Zionism in Arab discourses 9781526109439

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction: Islamism and liberalism in the Arab world: some theoretical remarks
Islamism, Zionism and Israel: a war of no compromises and compromises during war
‘At Basel I founded an ideal for the Muslims’: Zionism and Israel as role models in Islamist writing
Arab liberals between the struggle against despotism and the war against Zionism
The West within the East: Israel as a role model in liberal thought
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Zionism in Arab discourses

Zionism in Arab discourses Uriya Shavit and Ofir Winter

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Uriya Shavit and Ofir Winter 2016 The rights of Uriya Shavit and Ofir Winter to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 1 7849 9297 2  hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

To the memory of Haim Gal, curator of the Arab Press

Contents

Acknowledgementspage viii Prefacex Introduction: Islamism and liberalism in the Arab world: some theoretical remarks

1

1 Islamism, Zionism and Israel: a war of no compromises and compromises during war

25

2 ‘At Basel I founded an ideal for the Muslims’: Zionism and Israel as role models in Islamist writing

67

3 Arab liberals between the struggle against despotism and the war against Zionism

103

4 The West within the East: Israel as a role model in liberal thought148 Conclusion182 Bibliography186 Index207

Acknowledgements

We take great pleasure in paying tribute to the individuals and organizations whose support and assistance made the writing of this book possible. The book is an extended and revised version of a study published in Hebrew in 2013 by Hakibbutz Hameuchad and the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research. We are grateful to the Center for a grant that facilitated our research. We are also grateful to Prof. Eyal Zisser, Dean of Humanities at Tel Aviv University, for his advice and support, and to Prof. Joseph Klafter, President of the University, for his encouragement, without which this study could not have been written. The support of Prof. Shlomo Biderman, Prof. Yishai Peled, Dr Nehama Verbin, Prof. Ron Margolin, Tel Aviv University, and Prof. Amikam Nachmani, BarIlan University, was also invaluable. We are grateful to several scholars who read earlier drafts of the study and offered important comments, corrections and insights: Dr Wael Abu Uksa, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University; Dr Yossi Amitai, Ben Gurion University; Dr David Govrin, the Israeli Foreign Ministry; Prof. Asher Susser, Tel Aviv University; Prof. Itzchak Weismann, Haifa University; and Prof. Ephraim Yaar, Tel Aviv University. Prof. Sasson Somekh, former head of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo, enriched our understanding of Najib Mahfuz’s approach to Israel. Prof. Shimon Shamir, a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt and Jordan, provided essential analysis of the ‘peace camp’ that emerged in Egypt in the 1990s. Dr Esther Webman directed us to instructive studies on the evolution of anti-Semitic ideas in the Arab world. Immanuel Koplewitz enlightened us on Taha Hussein’s attitude to Zionism. Dr Sagi Polka offered important observations about contemporary Islamist thought. Dafna and Jacob Winter made the translation of the book possible. We are grateful to Ohad Stadler and Cecilia Sibony who translated the manuscript into English and to Carl Yonker who edited the translation.

Acknowledgements

ix

We are grateful to the staff at the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundations’ Library, Amman, for their indispensable assistance and gracious hospitality. We are greatly indebted to a number of friends in Jordan, Syria and Egypt who offered engrossing insights and reminded us that the issues we study are far from theoretical. The research assistance of Or Hareuveny, Kfir Gross, Carl Yonker, David Gabai, Ron Breznik and Yair Hoch was invaluable. We are also grateful to Michael Reshef and Dr Michael Barak for their assistance. We are grateful to Tony Mason, Senior Commissioning Editor, Manchester University Press, for his invaluable advice and encouragement, and to Judith Oppenheimer for her superb copy-editing of the book. We are also grateful to David Appleyard, Robert Byron and Andrew Kirk for their meticulous production of the book, their patience and good advice, and to Latte Goldstein for the splendid cover design. The book is dedicated to the memory of Haim Gal (1954–2011), who, for over three decades, headed the Arabic Press Archive at the Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University. Under his management and determined efforts, the archive became the largest of its kind in the world, comprising hundreds of Arabic newspapers and journals from the early twentieth century to the present. Haim knew by heart the location of thousands of containers in which his cherished treasures – 45 million pages of governmental and oppositional press – were preserved. All who were fortunate to have known him admired his immense knowledge, insights and generous assistance. Many studies on contemporary Arab societies, including this, could not have been written without him.

Preface

Every book has its moment of birth. This book’s moment was, perhaps, a few years ago, when a Jordanian-Palestinian friend of the authors finally managed to secure a visa for a short visit to Israel. These were memorable days. Together we explored the Old City of Jerusalem, walked along the seashore of Tel Aviv and visited the street in Jaffa from which our friend’s grandmother had been forced to flee in 1948. For years our friend, a peace-loving Arab patriot and devout Muslim, had encountered Israel on a daily basis through the Jordanian and panArab media. Israel was so close geographically – yet so distant in all other respects; just as Jordan was for us, until our first visit there. For our friend, seeing Israel at first hand for the first time, some things were a disappointment, while others impressed him. We were intrigued to notice, for example, how astonished our friend was when he saw Arab Israelis on the boulevards of Tel Aviv. The experience forced us to reflect on a sad truth: given that so few Israelis visit Arab countries, and even fewer Arabs visit Israel, for most individuals on both sides of the borders the ‘other’ exists only as an imagined construct. In the Arab–Israeli conflict, the imagined is, in a sense, more real than any reality. What follows is a study of Zionism and Israel as imagined entities in the writings of two ideological forces within Arab societies – Islamists and liberals. Starting with late nineteenth-century writings, but focusing primarily on the period from the Six Day War to the Arab Spring, this book explores how Arab Islamist and liberal ideologists and activists have treated one of the most remarkable and least predictable success stories of the twentieth century, which has also become one of the gravest tragedies of the Arab world, and of the Palestinian people in particular. The book makes a comparative analysis of the relation between the political visions of Islamists and liberals and their conceptualizations of Zionism and Israel, exposing complex and nuanced views. Its main thesis is that the Zionist enterprise has played a dual function in the

Preface

xi

doctrines of both Arab Islamists and liberals: on the one hand, it is an enemy; on the other hand, a role model. As an enemy – or at the very least, an adversary – its victories on the battlefield and in the diplomatic arena have attested to the failures of Arab regimes and to the essentiality of embracing alternative worldviews. In Islamist thought the Zionist enterprise has been portrayed as a brutal, criminal and depraved rival, whose annihilation will be attainable only through the establishment of Islamic political orders; however, Islamists have also conceded that certain pragmatic provisional arrangements can be reached with Israel. The liberals are split between a ‘peace camp’ and a ‘refusal camp’. The former, putting individual freedoms at the core of their agenda, have reached the conclusion that regardless of whether Zionism is legitimate, the realization of the liberal agenda requires a political compromise over Palestine; the latter, putting national independence at the core of their agenda, have stressed that only realization of the liberal agenda will allow Arabs to stand tall in the conflict against Zionism. Another function of the Zionist enterprise in both Islamist and liberal thought has been that of a role model. The Zionist enterprise has been depicted as an ‘other’ that reflects values, methods of operation and institutions of which Arab societies should take heed. Islamists and liberals alike have discovered in Zionism and in Israeli society – or more precisely in Zionism and Israeli society as constructed by them to fit their specific agendas – qualities they have sought to implement in their own societies, whose shortcomings have been critically highlighted by interpretations of Zionist successes. Islamists have emphasized the religious (and more specifically religious-modern) essence of the Zionist movement, the cohesion and resourcefulness of Zionists, the meticulous plan that led to the establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish diaspora’s support of the Zionist enterprise and the similitude between Israeli democracy and the democracy that Islamists wish to establish in Arab societies. Liberals have emphasized the pluralistic nature of Israeli society, the freedom of expression enjoyed by its citizens, its strong relations with the West, the pragmatism of its leaders and its scientific, technological and economic accomplishments. The duality of the Zionist enterprise in the doctrines of Arab Islamists and liberals is not unique, but characterizes their views of the West in general. As analysed throughout this book, Islamists describe the West as a vicious and corrupt ‘other’, but also as a representative of certain Islamic ideals that need to be re-embraced in Muslim societies, while liberals describe the West as both a liberator and a conqueror, an ­ideological reference and imperialistic threat at the same time. Islamism and liberalism enjoyed little actual political clout in Arab

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Preface

states throughout most of the twentieth century. The liberals never regained their influence after their bitter, short-lived hegemony in the 1920s and the 1930s came to an end. Maintaining an outlook that was condemned and declined, they remained marginal and despondent. Islamists have grown stronger since the 1970s but nevertheless have failed in nearly every struggle to attain tangible power. Following the string of uprisings that began in late 2010 and were named the Arab Spring, the fortunes of these ideologies appeared to change, at least for a while. The revolutionary wave started with the tragic demonstration of Muhammad al-Buazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor from Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, who, on 17 December 2010, set himself on fire in protest at the confiscation of his cart. Al-Buazizi’s death ignited spontaneous mass protests that spread from Tunisia in a domino effect, especially to the republican-dynastic Arab regimes. The leaderships of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen crumbled, while the Syrian regime was confronted by a colossal armed uprising. The liberal voice resonated loudly in the early days of the uprisings, yet, when first put to the electoral test, in Tunisia in October 2011 and in Egypt a month later, it was exposed as weak, divided and lacking any substantial popular base. Entering the arena of the Arab Spring at a later stage, Islamists won the first parliamentary elections in Tunisia and Egypt with a clear-cut, albeit not absolute, majority. In Tunisia, Islamists opted for national unity and consensus politics, and the newly established democratic regime in the country survived, though it remained fragile. In Egypt, Islamists also won the presidential race and a referendum on a new constitution, and sought to implement their agenda more rigorously. Their victories turned out to be a double-edged sword: in a military coup in July 2013, following mass demonstrations, they were desposed from power and their leaders were imprisoned. In elections held in Libya in July 2012, a coalition of relatively liberal movements – even though it was far from constituting a secular opposition – defeated the Islamists; the country remained unstable. In Yemen, the ousted president was succeeded by his deputy. As of late 2015, a transition to democracy was yet to occur. Predictions that liberal democracy – or the Islamist worldview – would sweep other Arab societies have thus far failed to materialize. The turbulent times of 2010–13 cannot be broadly defined as marking a rise – or rise and fall – of either Arab Islamism or Arab liberalism. It is in fact too early to define them in conclusive terms at all. Yet they have demonstrated that a plurality of worldviews competes for power in various Arab countries and have highlighted once again the importance of acquiring a deeper understanding of the contested ideological map of the Middle East.

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The book is divided into five chapters. The introductory chapter discusses the theoretical precariousness of the terms ‘Arab Islamist’ and ‘Arab liberal’ and offers definitions of these ideologies and a brief chronology of their development. It also presents the methodology and anthology used in the research. Chapter 1 discusses the formation of the Islamist approach toward Zionism and Israel. It explores the treatment of Israel as an illegitimate entity and an enemy that should be eradicated, the reasons for the development of an Islamist consensus around this position and the pragmatic adjustments made by Islamist leaders and organizations with regard to Israel. Chapter 2 discusses Islamist depictions of Zionism and Israel as role models and analyses the reasons for the formation and acceptance of such interpretations. Chapter 3 discusses the evolution of diverse liberal approaches to the legitimization of the Zionist enterprise, peace agreements with Israel and normalization with it, and sheds light on the reasons for disagreements on these issues within the liberal camp. Chapter 4 discusses liberal interpretations that represent Zionism and Israel as role models, and analyses the reasons for the formation and acceptance of such interpretations.

Note on quotations In direct quotations, comments by the authors of this book are enclosed in square brackets. Some of the terminology used in the book is politically charged. Thus, for instance, one person’s War of Independence is another’s nakba, or disaster. We have made an effort to use terminology that coincides with the views of the authors discussed, even when the excerpts are not a direct quote.

Introduction Islamism and liberalism in the Arab world: some theoretical remarks This book regards Arab Islamism and liberalism as distinct political ideologies with all-encompassing views on the structure and appropriate roles of society and the state. The thesis presented here on the different functions of Israel and Zionism within these two ideologies refers to a protracted period of time and establishes several generalizations about the actions of individuals and groups in a vast geographic and linguistic space. Therefore, a preliminary examination of the validity of the terms ‘Arab Islamism’ and ‘Arab liberalism’, and of the methodology that has guided us, is necessary. In the field of intellectual history, the potential caveat of superficiality should never be ignored. On the one hand, there exists the risk that the particular outlines of individuals and groups will be blurred through a broad and generalizing lens; on the other hand, there exists a fear of the equally superficial reversal of this reduction, a detailed discussion that overlooks shared historical foundations and the relationships that lie at the core of the formulation and implementation of ideas. Ideologicalpolitical currents have been a driving force throughout history; however, they are amorphous when compared to other forces, for example, political parties, the mere establishment of which draws clear boundaries for an analysis. Thus, the analytical merit of any discussion of an ideological current is determined by a delineation that is neither too wide nor too narrow. There are three conditions that define ‘ideology’ as an umbrella for thinkers and activists not necessarily belonging to one hierarchic organization: firstly, they must share similar views regarding fundamental issues that distinguish them from other groups; secondly, they must rely on a similar theoretical constitutive foundation; thirdly, they must engage with ideas articulated by other adherents of their ideology in a way that acknowledges the similarity of their views. The attainment of these three conditions may not spare the discussion from further difficulties, but it does render the reviewer immune from blanket ­generalizations and theoretical and analytical detachment.

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Zionism in Arab discourses

These challenges are common to all studies of ideological movements that seek to influence political realities, yet their importance is paramount to the Arab linguistic and political space. Since the 1980s, the research pendulum has been vacillating between two competing, hostile and increasingly non-constructive perceptions of the validity of ‘Arabness’ (and more so of ‘Islam’) as the base for generalizations. At one end of the spectrum ‘the Arabs’ (or ‘the Muslims’) are written off as homogeneous, especially, but not exclusively, in media discussions. In this perspective, Marxists, Liberals, Islamists, salafis, nationalists and even opportunists are amalgamated, due to their shared linguistic, ethnic and religious identities; the Quran is perceived as insusceptible to reflexive interpretations or change; and the ‘Arab world’ (or Muslim world) is an active player and influential voice in history, capable of rage, resistance or reconciliation. This approach reduces ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslims’ to replicable cardboard cut-outs. Under the influence of the American-Palestinian thinker Edward Said, the approach at the opposite end of the spectrum has been on the rise since the late 1970s. It rejects a general study whose framework is ‘Arabness’ or ‘Islam’, particularly if it can be interpreted as critical, and sees any such discourse as being part of an imperialist (or neo-­imperialist) effort to establish hegemony and justify subjugation. According to this approach, ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ spokespersons are fickle figments of the imagination, serving political and economic agendas. The major flaw of this approach is that it tempts researchers to stray from their mission to introduce something meaningful and shift toward the more comfortable yet futile statement that reality is too complex for anything of value to be said about it. It ignores the fact that alongside the dynamism and manifold layers of ‘Arabness’ there also exist geographic contiguity, shared historical experiences, a common tongue, joint religious elements and, especially, groups and institutions whose ideologies perceive ‘Arabness’ or ‘Islam’, or ‘Arabness’ and ‘Islam’, as genuine and fundamental concepts, thus granting social and political significance to these terms. The key to balancing the two approaches is to adopt an approach that does not ignore the uniqueness of different groups at the state and sub-state levels, or the existence of ideologies that traverse these borders. The revolutions and the attempts at revolutions, for which the term ‘Arab Spring’ was coined, represent a recent example of why the balanced approach is essential. Research that will examine the events as a whole will miss the unique contexts leading to the upheavals in different Arab countries; the motivations of the demonstrators in Tahrir Square were not the same as those of the rebels fighting against the

Introduction

3

regime of al-Qadhafi, nor were the sequences of events leading to the downfalls of the Egyptian and Libyan despots. However, research that rejects ‘Arabness’ as one of the frameworks for comprehending the Arab Spring will miss significant insights. Throughout 2011, the uprisings in certain countries across the Arab world inspired and influenced others in the region, without spilling over into them. This was manifested in the following examples: activists adopted identical revolutionary phrases; pan-Arab television networks played an instrumental, albeit not decisive, role in fomenting or calming the revolutionary flames; the participants perceived themselves as partaking in an event that concerns Arabs everywhere; and the concentration of the revolutions in states ruled by the republican dynasties of the Arab world demonstrated resistance to a specific political reality that has distinctive Arab characteristics. This balancing distinction also applies to the concepts of Islamism and liberalism. The analysis of Islamism as an ideological and political phenomenon from a pan-Arab (and even pan-Muslim) perspective is the topic of lively discussion. The term developed in Western studies in the early 1980s as a framework for understanding the emergence of movements that touted the Islamic flag in Arab societies, but was given different definitions, generating a wide spectrum of meanings and dulling its analytical value. Some defined granting a key role to Islam in organizing civil and social life, or the political use of Islam, as an expression of Islamism.1 Others have characterized Islamism by the ideological goal of regulating society, culture and politics in accordance with Islam.2 Still others have questioned the analytical value of the general discussion of Islamism as a phenomenon.3 Each of these approaches is not without flaws. The broad definition might lead to an absurd generalizing result; in contemporary Arab political thought, only a few do not grant Islam (in any form of its interpretation) a significant role, nor use Islamic ideas generously in order to gain legitimization. The narrower approach is still problematic. Defining Islamism by ideological goals, without addressing modes of operation and religio-legal approaches, artificially joins under one umbrella groups that are in strong contention and that rely, at least partially, on contradictory theoretical bases. On the other hand, abandoning this term altogether limits the ability to profoundly comprehend movements and individuals that have shared ideological roots and partake in an intellectual exchange with one another. One of the sensitivities accompanying Islamism is that the term originates from Western researchers, some of whom employ a critical approach toward the phenomenon. A concern also exists about confusing Islam as a religion and Islamism as a particular interpretation of religion. Nevertheless, even though the notion is uncommon in Islamist

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writing itself, it is present4 and is not necessarily perceived as negative by its spokespersons. We define Islamism, drawing from the definitions of Oliver Roy5 and Haydar Ibrahim Ali,6 as an ideology that views Islam as an exclusive political reference and political activism as the primary means to instate Islam as such. An Islamist is someone who connects the objectives of his ideology, which place the all-encompassing nature of Islam at their core, with a concrete political and social plan that he then tries to execute. The founding father of this ideology, albeit not its sole originator, is Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), who established the Muslim Brothers at the age of 22; his teachings still serve as a central theoretical reference for many contemporary Islamists. The main established spokespersons of Islamism under this definition are the Muslim Brothers movement and their affiliated movements in different Arab countries; yet some of its most prominent spokespersons are not, or have never been, official members of the movement. The goal of Islamism, according to al-Banna’s designs, is to instigate a revolution. This revolution has three dimensions: a return to the sovereignty of Islam over all aspects of life; gradually re-establishing the Muslim nation as a viable political framework; and dispelling Western hegemony over Islamic societies.7 The Islamist loyal to al-Banna’s teachings seeks to replace the non-Islamic political order by an Islamic one through the creation of a hierarchical organization that promotes an array of social and indoctrinating activities, from welfare to sports. In principle, the Islamist who follows al-Banna does not rule out violence as a way to overcome enemies of the revolution; however, he sees it as a last resort and believes that prolonged, multi-faceted appeals to hearts and minds will ultimately lead to the establishment of the rule of Islam.8 The development of the Muslim Brothers from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the twilight of pan-Arab socialism in the early 1970s can be roughly divided into two main stages. In the first stage, from its formation in Egypt in 1928 until the mid-1950s, the movement was based in Egypt and branches were established in other Arab countries. As compared to rival ideologies, Islamism gained popular support, but did not achieve a critical mass in any country that would allow it to gain control, whether through the voting booth or through violence. In the second stage, from the mid-1950s until after the Six Day War in 1967, Islamism was overrun by Nasserist and Bathist revolutions, and also failed to gain support within the conservative monarchies that did not witness revolutions. After the decline of pan-Arabism, from the 1970s to the Arab Spring, Islamist movements grew stronger, increasing their influence in matters

Introduction

5

of society and culture, but had yet to take over the government of any Arab state. During this period, groups of dissidents who followed the later writings of Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) split from the main Islamist faction. While the main faction stayed true to the methods of al-Banna, which recruited widespread popular support through educational and political activities as a method to capture power, the dissidents identified with the romantic-radical approach developed by Qutb. This approach views any regime not implementing the rules of Islam as a regime of infidels, whose demise will be achieved only through the formation of a vanguard of the pure of heart, secession from society and, if necessary, the use of violence against regimes that feign being Muslim.9 Despite other similar ideological elements, the elitism, romanticism and militarism that characterize their approach, as well as the tendency of some toward religious purism, have created mutual exclusion between them and the main faction of Islamism, whose leaders are the successors of al-Banna. Islamism, as a modern revolutionary perception that connects an interpretation of religion with political activism and establishes mass, grassroots movements, should be differentiated from the Saudi and Saudi-affiliated variations of salafism, also known as wahhabism (a term that contemporary Saudi salafis consider an insult because they seek to identify their ideology with the path of the first three generations of Islam, the salaf; the Prophet predicted that these three generations would be the best that the nation would have). Salafiyya, which has spread outside of Saudi Arabia’s borders, also identifies with the objectives of a return to Islamic rule, unifying the Muslim nation and repelling the West. Nevertheless, it avoids political subversion against Muslim regimes and loathes the partisanship and religious pragmatism characterizing many of al-Banna’s successors, to the extent that salafis see the Muslim Brothers as deviators from the right path.10 Saudi salafis and some of their loyalists abroad promote a literalist interpretation of religious law, while withdrawing from political involvement – a withdrawal to which some followers of salafiyya outside and inside the kingdom are not committed. The main faction of Islamism adheres to wasatiyya, or the ‘harmonious golden path’. The followers of this faction depict Islam as merging and balancing mind and matter, stability and change, capitalism and socialism, individualism and society, and faith and science; this is in opposition to ‘Westernizers’ who have abandoned Islam as a comprehensive way of life, and Muslims who remain stagnant or practise extremism. The wasatis, who are predominantly graduates of al-Azhar University, promote an integrative-restrictive approach toward the

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achievements of the West and a pragmatic approach to religious law.11 They continue the modernist-apologetic approach perfected by the alManar school during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which purports that a true reading of Islam teaches that there can be no contradiction between empirical science and the word of the Quran; the Western Renaissance originates from encounters with Muslim societies at a time when they were still faithful to the word of God; scientific and technological development and freedom from tyranny are Islamic decrees; and Western innovation should not be dismissed a priori but, rather, accepted or rejected in accordance with Islamic standards (see Chapter 2). Hence, the wasatis common depiction as fundamentalists is partially misleading. In its original American sense, fundamentalism is a movement that opposes liberal interpretations of the scriptures and insists on their literalist reading.12 As opposed to the American fundamentalists, the wasati Islamists indeed describe themselves as those who return to the ways of Islam’s founding fathers, but they endorse a ­flexible and creative hermeneutic method. Wasati Islamists’ pragmatic approach toward religious law emphasizes the obligation to rule in accordance with the primary objectives of the Lawgiver and the demands of reality, to make the lives of the believers easier where possible (taysir) and to weigh the benefits and harms of each decision (muwazana). This approach, which also relies in part on a road paved by modernist apologists, lends jurists more flexibility by encouraging searches for the most suitable answer beyond one school of law and broadly implementing the principle of the public and individual good (maslaha) as a basis of religious rulings. It creates a wide and flexible range for legitimizing the suspension of prohibitions and the expansion of permissions, while still maintaining and declaring loyalty to ‘authentic’ Islam.13 The keys to understanding Islamist scholarship are the fundamental experiences of Muslim societies’ failure in the face of Western powers, and the continuous failure of Islamist movements to capture power in Arab lands. Islamists use the historical narrative of the ‘cultural attack’ (al-ghazw al-thaqafi) or the ‘ideological attack’ (al-ghazw al-fikri) to explain both these failures. It is a conspiracy theory that offers an alternative interpretation to conventional historiographies and portrays the West as a cohesive entity behind an ongoing assault against the Muslim world. According to this theory, adopted by Hasan al-Banna, accepted by his successors and rooted in modernist-apologetic writings, Europe realized, following the defeat of the Crusaders, that as long as Muslims maintained their loyalty to Islam they would never be defeated in battle. Therefore, in their modern campaigns against Islam, starting with the

Introduction

7

occupation of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798, Christians have been determined to strengthen their hold over Muslims through a combination of military and cultural means. Their relentless cultural onslaught utilizes several methods that include secular education and missionary activity; the distribution of man-made anti-Islamic ideologies such as communism and feminism; placing in positions of power quasi-Muslim leaders whose role is to protect Western interests; the cultivation of mass-media outlets and the spread of destructive cultural pastimes. Islamists believe that the ‘cultural attack’ has succeeded in distancing Muslims from their devotion to religion, thus ensuring the continuation of Western hegemony. The prominence of this conspiracy theory in Islamist writings derives from its reassuring essence. It suggests that the weakness of Muslim societies in comparison to the West originates not from their religious identity but from their detachment from religion and their blindness toward the multiple facets of imperialism; and that the reason for the failure of the Islamist agenda throughout the twentieth century lies not within misinterpreting the will of God, but within the existence of Western-controlled puppet rulers posing as devout Muslims. At times, when the political avenue was blocked to Islamists, this theory justified diverting most of their efforts toward dealing with cultural and social issues, rather than subversive political activism.14 Hasan al-Banna, the mentor-founder of Islamist thought, was both a leader and a thinker. In post al-Banna Islamism, the roles of intellectual leadership and political leadership were often divided. Two of the most influential and prolific Islamist wasati thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century are Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–66) and Yusuf alQaradawi (b. 1926), both Egyptian al-Azhar graduates and disciples of al-Banna. Both were not officially members of the Brothers for most of their lives (al-Ghazali was expelled from the movement in 1953, and alQaradawi twice declined an offer to serve as its General Guide, seeking instead to carve out for himself the status of a non-partisan leader).15 Another prominent Islamist thinker, Muhammad Imara (b. 1931), was never a member of the Muslim Brothers and his writings are mainly anchored in and interpret the writings of the fathers of the modernist apologetic school. Muhammad Qutb (1919–2014), Sayyid’s brother and one of the major thinkers of the salafi-leaning (in the contemporary sense of the word) faction of Islamism, abstained from direct political activity following his exile to Saudi Arabia in 1972.16 Rashid al-Ghannushi (b. 1941), the founder of al-Nahda, the Tunisian Islamist political party, was forced into exile in London in 1989. From then and until his return to Tunisia in January 2011, he focused mainly on writing.17 The Sudanese Hasan al-Turabi (b. 1932), who gained prominence with his

8

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writing in the early 1980s, is the exception as an Islamist intellectual who became the main political figure in his country, although in 2001 he was removed from this influential position. Much as the beholder of a painting can detect the signature of a school or a master by the brushstroke, the reader of Islamist texts can identify their unique characteristics. However, this does not mean that Islamist ideology is a homogeneous system, or that all of its speakers are cut from the same cloth. Even the narrow definition of the mainstream Islamist ideology presented here consolidates both those fearing an overstated rationalistic pragmatist approach and those dreading a stagnated approach. A study that ignores the intellectual origins of an Islamist writer will by necessity be impaired, but so will be a study that ignores the concrete political and social circumstances that the Islamist writer refers to, and his positioning in relation to a vast array of questions. One cannot understand the Palestinian Hamas or the Tunisian al-Nahda without the foundations of Islamist ideology; yet an analysis that disregards their unique Palestinian and Tunisian contexts, their formations and their methods of operation, will not be complete. The term Arab liberalism is just as complex, but it is not the focus of as much interest and academic debate as is Islamism.18 According to the writings of Arab liberals, as well as the body of research on them, their philosophy and politics are reliant on a multi-faceted approach bred in the West that claims to hold a universal truth. Manning defined Western liberalism as a diverse tradition of ideological writing relating to a common frame of thought initiated by the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. Its basis lies in the perception that all men have inalienable rights to freedom: freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and the freedom to hold property. Additionally, it maintains that the individual is the centre of the political and social sphere; the political community is sovereign and the ruler draws his or her legitimacy from it, rather than from the grace of God; no faith should be forced upon a person; and scientific research and political action should be guided by human logic, empirical study and scepticism, and not by religious canon.19 The first use of the term ‘liberals’ to define a political group was recorded at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Spain, to describe the defenders of the 1812 Constitution, and in England as a derogatory term used by the conservative faction. While all liberals remain loyal to political freedom and political equality as guiding principles, in post-Second World War politics, Western liberal movements that define themselves as such have been positioned on conflicting sides of the political spectrum, with some representing the middle road between conservatives and social democrats, and others representing either relatively

Introduction

9

conservative or social-democratic approaches. The diversity of political forces that flaunt the title of liberalism attests to its appeal; however, the term has been attributed a derogatory connotation in recent decades in America (causing politicians to reject it), as it has been identified with excessive governmental intervention in the life of the individual and being soft on crime. Studies focused on Arab liberalism note the difficulty in identifying it as a homogeneous and cohesive worldview.20 Contemporary Arab intellectuals who define themselves as liberals portray Arab liberalism as an ideological heritage that draws on the guiding principles of Western liberalism to issue specific demands from Arab societies. For instance, Shakir al-Nabulsi (1940–2014), an exiled Jordanian literary scholar and columnist who resided in the United States and was one of the most prolific spokespeople of Arab liberalism, defined Arab liberals as pluralistic democrats who advance freedom of religion, freedom of expression and economic freedom, and who call for equality between men and women, subjugation of religious thought to scientific criticism and the separation of religion and politics.21 The British-Iraqi writer Abd al-Khaliq Hussein has defined liberalism as a movement characterized by championing civil rights and opposing religious oppression.22 The Network of Arab Liberals, an umbrella organization for Arab political parties and activists from Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, identifies liberalism with free elections, pluralism, separation of church and state, and economic freedom,23 while the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth identifies it with individualism and the government’s accountability to its constituents.24 In our perception, these self-definitions do not exhaust the nuances of Arab liberalism. In the mere fundamental support of democracy and civil liberties, the Arab liberal is not unique, because since the First World War almost all of the political factions within Arab societies have adopted democracy and civil liberties as norms, some only in a formal or grotesque way. The characteristic distinctions of those defining themselves as Arab liberals are that democracy and civil liberties represent the core of their ideology and its goal rather than means of promoting other agendas; and that their perception is not anchored in a canonical religious reference (even though it does not necessarily oppose relying on religious canon as a way of upholding the legitimacy of liberal ideas). A common chronological and conceptual demarcation depicts openness toward Western culture as a trademark of Arab liberalism, blurring in the process the borders between Islamic apologetic-modernism and liberal thought. Thus, for instance, Albert Hourani’s well-known Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age describes Rifaa al-Tahtawi, the head of the

10

Zionism in Arab discourses

chamber of translations founded by Muhammad Ali, as belonging to the first generation of that age, and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Muhammad Rashid Rida as central figures of that age,25 while al-Nabulsi assigns al-Afghani, Abduh and Rida to the first of three generations of Arab liberals.26 This delineation blurs the differentiation between liberalism and Islamic apologetic-modernism. There is an inherent anti-liberal element in the modernist-apologetic ambition to revalidate a religious canon as the ultimate source of authority over society and politics. Indeed, in retrospect, Hourani himself wondered if he was erroneous in understanding the reformism from 1830 to the beginning of the twentieth century as a discontinuation of a religious heritage, rather than as its continuation.27 It is therefore more accurate to say that the doors opened by the Islamic modernist-apologists enabled the rise of two contradictory approaches, even if they overlap at certain points – Islamism and liberalism. The former relied on the modernist stance that Western accomplishments are a distortion of Islam’s virtues, and thus learning from it is legitimate. The latter relied on Western luminaries as the highest source of authority and demanded to learn the meaning of democracy, science, technology and social organizing methods from the West in a direct and unmediated manner. The Egyptian party Hizb al-Umma was the first to bring this liberal approach to political fruition. It was founded in 1907 by Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, a disciple of Abduh; two decades later, the Constitutional Liberals Party emerged from it.28 During British and French direct rule over the Middle East, liberal philosophy blossomed, especially in Egypt and Syria, and the foundations of liberal governmental structures in independent states and independent states-to-be were created. Even if it was a ‘golden age’, liberalism remained artificial in two ways: it was adopted by the elites and did not spread to other strata of society, which mostly remained religious and traditional; and it was supported by Western powers that held the dual roles of occupier and liberator, not realizing in their policies the ideology that they preached. As a result, by the 1930s even the most liberal factions were disillusioned by the perception of the West as a role model. In the post-liberal period, marked by the 1952 Free Officers Revolution in Egypt, a socialist pan-Arab ideology that rejected liberalism as imperialism in disguise became the dominant force in Arab politics. During this period, the liberal voice weakened almost to the point of extinction, both in revolutionary regimes and in the conservative dynasties. The decline of pan-Arabism in the 1970s brought, to some extent, a rejuvenation of liberalism as an ideology. The promise of liberation that resulted in dictatorship, the promise of victory that ended in defeat

Introduction

11

and the promise of progress that deteriorated into degeneration and corruption reaffirmed the liberal principles of liberty, pragmatism and rationalism. The liberal voices that emerged (or resurfaced) directed their doctrine to one of two channels, and sometimes to both – the whole Arab world that needs reform, and specific Arab nation-states. The significant benchmarks in the resurgence of liberalism include the self-examination following the defeat in the Six Day War, which witnessed the emergence, particularly in Egypt, of liberal voices, even if only on the margins of the establishment’s political discourse, calling for a rationalization of society and political reforms; the liberalization and democratization of southern Europe and South America and the weakening of the Soviet bloc that led some liberals to proclaim in the early 1980s that the lack of political freedoms was the biggest problem in Arab societies; the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990, which encouraged a poignant debate among intellectual circles about the harms of tyranny and led liberal thinkers to demand, outright, that the transition to democracy should not be delayed any longer; the anointing of a young generation of Arab rulers in four Arab states between 1999 and 2000 that presented a propitious time for liberal thinkers and activists to demand political reforms; and the formation of the democratization doctrine by the administration of American President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks. The latter linked personal and political freedoms in Arab states with the elimination of the threat of terrorism against the West, replaced a tyrannical regime in Iraq with an elected one and for the first time brought about pluralistic elections for the Egyptian presidency and the Palestinian Legislative Council, while also reaffirming objections to Western involvement in inner-Arab affairs, including by certain Arab liberals.29 During its emergence as an ideological alternative from the 1970s through to the Arab Spring, liberalism did not receive broad popular support and no charismatic liberal leader of stature rose to prominence in any Arab society or Arab diasporic community. Understanding the failure of liberalism in re-establishing itself in Arab society requires a study of the particular circumstances of each society. Nevertheless, one can point to three difficulties shared by the majority of Arab liberal activists from the wane of Nasserism until the Arab Spring. The first is that in the Arab world liberalism, as opposed to Islamism, has been tried and has failed. Therefore, liberals had a problem in attaining negative legitimization, that is, building on the failure of their opponents. The second is that, similarly to when it first appeared, liberalism encountered societies that are largely religiously devout and suspicious of an ideology

12

Zionism in Arab discourses

perceived as imported. The third is that liberals, unlike Islamists, did not have the social infrastructure of mosques and social welfare enterprises, rather, only the ideology. In its re-emergence liberalism was exposed as an ideology with no ground troops; a handful of umbrella organizations with little clout, fractions of parties and lone intellectuals, some in exile, that did not appeal to the masses. A forlorn testimony of its weakness is that its followers did not even establish a central pan-Arab stage through which to promote their ideas. The previously established forums that showcased liberal ideas remained uncommitted; the Center for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut, that led the discussion on democracy in the 1980s and 1990s convened conferences and published impressive treatises, but never formulated a concrete action plan. Al-Dimuqratiyya journal published by al-Ahram has served as an outlet for pro-liberal academic studies since its inception in 2001, yet not as a venue that fashions a revolutionary platform. The main issues with which Arab liberal thinkers have had to cope since the 1970s, and particularly since the fall of communism, are related to the inability to gain widespread support for the ideology and the new challenges it faced. Liberals have deliberated intensely on the problems that democracy and civil liberties have had in taking root in their countries. According to their writings and participation in international conferences, the tight grip of Arab regimes on the religious establishments, culture, media and academy in their respective countries was a crucial factor in the failure of liberalism to re-emerge as a vibrant force. Liberal writing has discussed the key to democratization: building civil society, or a broader infrastructure of social organizations such as political parties, unions and activist groups which are independent of the regime and its whims, can serve as a block against tyranny and cultivate diverse cultural and democratic mechanisms.30 In addition, liberals have maintained the understanding that the transition to democracy will not happen in a day, and that a successful outcome will entail a prolonged struggle.31 Another issue that has often resurfaced as a challenge for liberals since the 1970s is the role of religion within society. Aside from a few isolated examples, Muslim Arab liberals were not apostates. They accepted Muhammad as the true final prophet and the Quran as the word of God, and did not question the seminal role of Islam in cultural and social life. Their demands that religious law should not be a reference for politics and that criticism of religious conventions should be tolerated did not represent a renunciation of Islam but a different outlook on it. When, in the post pan-Arab era, Islamism became the strongest ideological opposition to the non-democratic regimes, repudiation of the Muslim

Introduction

13

Brothers’ ideology began to gain prominence in liberal thought. Liberal thinkers emphasized the fundamental contradiction between a modern democratic society and one relying on religious law and tradition as its ultimate reference and in fact monopolizing one specific interpretation of religion. They portrayed the Muslim Brothers as opportunistically exploiting religion for political purposes and attempting to distance Arab societies in a reactionary way from the scientific, technological and economic reforms they desperately needed. They made it clear that even in a society that is religiously devout civil liberties are meaningless if some attempt to force their beliefs onto others.32 Another issue at the heart of the liberal discourse since its reawakening is the desired economic structure of society. This matter is almost an exact reflection of one of the major disagreements in Western democracies between social democrats, who emphasize that political liberty without a measure of social equality is meaningless and fragile, and capitalists, who maintain that political liberty that does not incorporate economic liberty is not liberty at all. For instance, while one of the two factions of the Egyptian liberal party al-Ghad defined ‘social liberalism’, or socialism, as the most dramatic development in the history of liberalism because this ideology seeks to abolish poverty and social classes,33 the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth defined the ‘promotion of market economy and minimal governmental involvement’ as one of the ­characteristics of liberalism.34 The most controversial issue in Arab liberal thought since the 1970s is a Gordian knot that has entangled and frustrated this ideology from the start. Arab liberalism utilizes Western examples and Western liberal works as a source of inspiration; however, as its liberal approach dictates, it also aspires for Arab societies to become independent, sovereign and free from any foreign rule. The first Arab liberals believed that without boarding the modern Western ‘civilization train’ Arab societies were doomed. Nonetheless, even writings that showcased this position in the most crystallized manner did not refrain from adopting a critical and ironic tone toward certain aspects of Western culture, and did not call on Arabs to relinquish their quest for independence. After the First World War the tension between modernization and independence proved a real conundrum for the liberals, as they had to decide which struggle to prioritize: freeing themselves from British or French rule, or the political, educational and scientific advancement of their societies. The discord between these positions split the liberal camps in Egypt and Syria. Still, the dilemma was not only political but also ideological; how can one form an independent and robust ‘self’ while seeking to imitate a

14

Zionism in Arab discourses

stronger ‘other’? In 1938, Taha Hussein, already regarded as one of the most prominent Egyptian liberal intellectuals, suggested a bold solution in one of his most controversial essays. He argued that, in essence and nature, Egypt is culturally and intellectually part of Europe, and that realizing where it really belongs and acting accordingly are the keys for Egyptians to maintain their dignity in front of Europeans.35 The vast majority of his successors did not accept the synthesis he created. The existence of an Arab Muslim ‘self’ that is not connected to the West has become a convention in liberal writing in the years following the decline of pan-Arab radicalism. However, the question of the extent to which Arab societies can rely on the West in their struggle against internal tyranny has remained the focus of fierce debate, with the lover’s wounds of the ‘liberal age’ still very much apparent. Some liberals have objected to any foreign involvement in Arab societies, labelling it as imperialism masquerading as liberalism whose sole purpose is to re-establish Western hegemony in the Middle East.36 At the other end of the spectrum, other liberals have endorsed active Western support in promoting democracy and liberty in Arab societies, even in military form. They have emphasized the necessity of pragmatism and forgoing the demons of the past in shaping the foreign policies of their countries; it did not matter whether the reform came on the ‘back of an Arab camel, an English tank, an American warship or a French submarine’, as long as it came.37 Be that as it may, Arab liberals persistently cannot do with and cannot do without the West. The weakness of liberalism in their societies has required them to receive the support of the West; yet such support has exposed them to allegations of being imperialist agents. A few methodological comments follow. This research is based on an amalgamation of quantitative and qualitative studies. Qualitatively, we have read several hundred books and essays by liberal and Islamist intellectuals and activists, both prominent and marginal, published from the late nineteenth century through to the Arab Spring, as well as party platforms, sermons, speeches and interviews. Most of the thinkers whose theories were examined are Egyptian, Palestinian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Syrian – five national identities whose direct clash with Zionism and Israel has motivated writing on the conflict. Writings by thinkers from Tunisia, Sudan, Iraq and other nationalities were also examined. In a quantitative manner, we examined how (if at all) Islamist and liberal writers referred to various events in Israel, in the two weeks following their occurrence, in a variety of newspapers that serve as central platforms for one of these two ideologies (al-Hayah, al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Siyasa, al-Wafd, al-Risala, al-Shab, al-Sabil, Filastin al-Muslima,

Introduction

15

Hadarat al-Islam). The Israel-related events examined are: the publication of the conclusions of the Agranat Committee on the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent resignation of Prime Minister Golda Meir; the 1976 Operation Entebbe; the publication of the conclusions of the Kahan Commission on the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre; the 1987 acquittal of Azat Nafsu, an Israeli-Circassian officer convicted of spying on the basis of false evidence; the 1991 Operation Solomon (an airlift of Ethiopian Jews); the Labour party’s electoral victory in 1992; the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the independence of the State of Israel; and the declaration and awarding of the Nobel Prize to professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover, Yisrael Aumann, and Ada Yonath.38 The research bookshelves abound with military and diplomatic histories of the Israeli–Arab conflict; the number of research enquiries that discuss perceptions of the Zionist movement and Israel in Arabic writing is smaller in comparison, and Israeli authors are prominent within it. Several researchers have discussed the way in which the position of Arab regimes (mainly Egyptian) toward Israel is reflected and passed on through official newspapers and the education system. Some have addressed the divergence in the Arab discourse regarding Israel. Others have discussed the relations of factions and movements in the Arab world toward Israel. These researchers serve as building blocks, or invaluable guides, in our work and we will list a few of them here. Yehoshafat Harkabi’s book, The Arabs’ Position in Their Conflict with Israel (1968), was one of the first to explore the image of Zionism, Jews and Israel in the Arab discourse of the 1950s and 1960s. It discovered that Zionism was perceived as a colonialist and racist movement that covets a land that belongs to another people.39 In his collection of essays, Egypt under Sadat: The Search for a New Orientation (1978), Shimon Shamir analysed why there was support for ending the conflict with Israel in governmental, liberal and leftist circles in Egypt in the 1970s. He found that the reason was pragmatic.40 In a series of essays, Rivka Yadlin and Amatzia Baram examined changes in the Egyptian perception of Israel just before and after the Sadat peace initiative, as reflected by the agendas of diverse ideological factions. They argued that there has been some moderation in the view of Israel as a demonic enemy, and that a differential perception of the Israeli collective has developed that also possesses some positive and humanistic elements. Several years after Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, Yadlin concluded that the image of Israel as seen in the Egyptian press wears a twofold, contradictory layer: on the one hand, progress in the acceptance of Israel’s right to exist under recognized borders, and on the other hand, lack of acknowledgement both of the legitimacy of Zionism and of Judaism as

16

Zionism in Arab discourses

a positive cultural heritage, and the persistent perception of Zionism as a racist, ever-expanding and aggressive enterprise. In the late 1980s Yadlin reached the conclusion that the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty did not diminish the expression of resistance and hatred towards the Zionist and Jewish nature of the State of Israel in the mainstream media in Egypt, nor in the thinking of Nasserist pan-Arab, Islamist leftist and social-democratic factions.41 Avraham Sela discussed Arab approaches to peace with Israel between the Madrid Conference and the al-Aqsa intifada and the dissimilarities between them. He found in the discourse of several Arab intellectuals a more realistic approach toward the State of Israel, a more heterogenic illustration of Israeli society and a certain withdrawal from the perception of Israel as an artificial entity devised by Western imperialism.42 Fouad Ajami examined the diverse voices in the Arab world following the diplomatic agreements signed by Egypt, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) with Israel. His study presented a handful of thinkers who created and spread novel, more balanced and positive views of Israel, in opposition to the hegemonic manner of thinkers, professional associations and political powers that maintained the old discourse of hate.43 Ewan Stein provided a broad overview of some Egyptian liberal, Nasserist, Islamist and Marxist approaches to Israel, with particular attention given to representations of the Zionist enterprise as an arm of imperialism. His study highlighted the centrality of the perception of Zionism as a threat, but also pointed to the diversity of opinions with regard to Israel within the Egyptian political discourse.44 Elie Podeh explored in what ways history and geography textbooks in Egypt presented Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict between 1955 and 1998. He found that the defeat in 1967 and the signing of the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty in 1979 served as junctures after which expressions of hatred against Israel disappeared and negative attitudes towards it dulled to some degree. Be that as it may, this moderation did not signify an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise, and the common perception of Israel has remained that of an illegitimate country that has expelled its rightful owners, strives to expand and serves Western imperialism.45 Yossi Amitay discussed the development of the Egyptian Left’s approach to the Israeli–Arab conflict. His study analysed the conflicting views in that camp, as well as its unique contribution to forging relations between Israelis and Arabs.46 In our study we have utilized three research approaches to understand ideological texts, and especially texts relating to the representation of the ‘other’ as an adversary or an enemy. The thinkers whose philosophies are examined in the book are intellectuals both in the broader

Introduction

17

sense of the term – those writers who express opinions about society and state on a regular basis – and in its narrower meaning – individuals who regularly voice their criticism of the actions of the majority and the institutions in their countries.47 The premise of the book, that ideas hold a prominent place in the shaping of political realities, draws from the tradition of the study of intellectual history. Partly due to an overall cynical approach to politics, in contemporary Middle Eastern studies some tend to under-estimate the practical importance of ideology and rhetoric, seeing them as worthy only of a literary or a philosophical study. We do not share this diminution and believe that the lessons of history, both dated and current, including the writing of the original version of this book in Hebrew, attest to its falsity. It is true that a political and social reality is never a perfect reflection of the ideas that are used to interpret and shape it. Political thought, whether it is broad and systematic or narrow and vague, is less influential than its formulators might hope, and is impacted on by changing circumstances more than they would care to admit. Nevertheless, most of the time, and especially in the case of movements reliant on a solid ideological tradition, political acts are not detached from a political thought that outlines goals, determines the boundaries of flexibility and sets the concepts through which the ­leadership and other activists seek to gain legitimacy. We have utilized the understanding of discourse as it was developed in the writings of Foucault,48 Said49 and others – a regime of knowledge, a system of control relationships that marks borders. The study of this system teaches us about the functions of its participants in relation to the establishment that dictates which purposes the knowledge is required to serve, what are the boundaries of the permitted and the prohibited and what constitutes being ‘within the realm of truth’ and ‘outside the realm of truth’. According to Said in his analysis of the representations of the Orient in Western societies, depictions of the ‘other’ as a sum of negative qualities oppositional to the ‘self’ serve political interests, and are part of a broader project of domination and subordination. In our study of the writings of Islamists and liberals on Zionism and Israel, we worked under the assumption that those writings were formed in relation to the borders of norms created by two circles of discourse: those of the ideological oppositional group, fenced off by its ideological tradition and pragmatic needs, and those of the regime, that set red lines for the opposition’s writing. However, as opposed to the Saidist approach and drawing from so-called Orientalist as well as post-colonialist critics of Said’s theorizing, primarily Homi K. Bhabha,50 the point of departure of our research is neither deterministic nor hermetic. First, in our perception, the participants in every discourse, including the Arab Islamist

18

Zionism in Arab discourses

and the Arab liberal discourses on Zionism and Israel, do not simply fortify a figment of imagination based exclusively on the candid and disclosed interests of the forces that operate on them. The manifestations of an ‘other’, as much as they are the product of the circumstances of a ‘self’, are also a reaction to a changing and substantial reality of that ‘other’. Second, sentiments toward and constructions of the ‘other’ are not necessarily binary and dichotomous. They may be hybrid, reflecting conflicting emotions, such as despisal and admiration, and seemingly conflicting interests, such as disassociation from the ‘other’ and imitation. A third approach that we have used draws on the study of social psychology, and especially on the works of Daniel Bar-Tal on the role of memory and narratives in the forming of Israeli-Jewish positions on the Israeli–Arab conflict. According to Bar-Tal, intractable conflicts (which he defines as prolonged, violent, central to the societies involved and perceived as irresolvable and zero-sum games) encourage the creation of a collective memory and an ethos, or a narrative regarding the present, the purpose of which is to create a rationalization of the struggle, achieve inner solidarity and justify using violence against the enemy. The parties that are fighting will glorify themselves, present themselves as victims and describe the enemy as extremist, uncompromising and cruel.51 Once a culture of conflict sets in and extols the fighting society, while delegitimizing the enemy, that culture is awarded a power of its own; therefore, disowning it and transitioning from it to a culture of peace is not immediate and necessitates the removal of psychological blocks. It requires mitigating processes such as the forming of a reconciliation committee or joint projects for the parties in conflict.52 The comparative study we have conducted between Islamists and liberals relies on these notions and reinforces them; we have found that while Islamists who are interested in the annihilation of Israel paint Israelis as spawn of the Devil, liberals who are interested in a peaceful solution to the conflict (a position not shared by the entire liberal camp) acknowledge the need to establish a more humane image of the Israeli. Nonetheless, our study has shown that a culture of conflict, even at its most extreme, does not necessarily generate memory and ethos that are black and white. Parallel to the dehumanization of Israel and the glorification of the Arabs at one level of Islamist writing, which are designed to enlist support for the ­struggle against Zionism, is another level designed to serve functions that are not directly related to the conflict with Israel, where Israel is praised and the Arabs are admonished.

Introduction

19

Notes  1 Fuller, for example, defined an Islamist (admittedly broadly) as a person who believes that ‘Islam as a body of faith has something important to say about how politics and society should be ordered in the contemporary Muslim world’ and who seeks to implement this idea in some fashion: G. E. Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. xi; Ayoob adopted a definition according to which Islamism is a form of instrumentalization of Islam by individuals, groups and organizations that pursue political objectives: M. Ayoob, ‘Political Islam: image and reality’, World Policy Journal (Fall 2004), 1.  2 For example, a definition according to which Islamism is a political and religious ideology that aims to establish an Islamic state under sharia law and reunite the Muslim nation: O. Roy and A. Sfeir (eds), The Columbia World Dictionary of Islamism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 170; a definition that emphasizes the Islamist demand to implement Islam in all aspects of life: L. Guazzone, ‘Islamism and Islamists in the contemporary Arab world’, in L. Guazzone (ed.), The Islamist Dilemma: The Political Role of Islamist Movements in the Contemporary Arab World (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1995), pp. 10–11; and a definition that centres on an Islamist belief in a collective return to religion as a remedy for the pressing problems facing Muslim societies: C. R. Wickham, Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism and Political Change in Egypt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p.1.  3 F. Burgat, ‘Veils and obscuring lenses’, in J. L. Eposito and F. Burgat (eds), Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in the Middle East and Europe (London: Hurst & Company, 2003), p. 19; B. O. Utvik, ‘Islamists from a distance’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 43:1 (February 2011), 141–3; M. E. Yapp, ‘Islam and Islamism’, Middle Eastern Studies, 40:2 (March 2004), 168.  4 For example, the usage of the word ‘Islamiyyun’ (Islamists) by al-Qaradawi and Imara: Y. al-Qaradawi, Ummatuna Bayna Qarnayn (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2002 [2000]), p. 58; M. Imara, al-Istiqlal al-Hadari (6th October City: Nahdat al-Misr lil-Tibaa wal-Nashr wal-Tawzi, January 2007), pp. 188–92; also the words of Rashid al-Ghannushi, according to which an Islamist movement is one that aims to reinstate Islam’s all-encompassing nature: F. Burgat and W. Dowel, The Islamic Movement in North Africa (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 9.  5 Roy defined Islamism as the ‘brand of modern political Islamic fundamentalism that claims to recreate a true Islamic society, not simply by imposing sharia but by establishing first an Islamic state through political action’: O. Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (London: Hurst & Company, 2002), p. 58.  6 Ali characterized Islamist movements as movements that champion a specific interpretation of Islam and aim to reconstruct society based on that interpretation: H. I. Ali, al-Tayyarat al-Islamiyya wa-Qadiyyat al-Dimuqratiyya (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wahda al-Arabiyya, 1996), pp. 32–3.

20

Zionism in Arab discourses

 7 On these principles see in a number of al-Banna’s foundational texts: ‘Risala nahwa al-nur’, October 1936, in Majmuat Rasail al-Imam al-Banna (Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi wal-Nashr al-Islamiyya, 2006), pp. 157, 171–2, 175–80; ‘Risalat al-mutamar al-khamis’, February 1939, in ibid., pp. 334–8, 359–60, 362–6, 372–5; ‘Risala bayna al-ams wal-yawm’, 1943, in ibid., pp. 525–6.  8 See H. al-Banna, ‘Risalat al-mutamar al-khamis’, in ibid., pp. 337, 341–2, 354–6.  9 These ideas appeared in S. Qutb’s final book, Maalim fi al-Tariq (Cairo: Dar Dimashq, n.d., [1964]), pp. 9–10, 21–2, 30–1, 64–6, 75–112. 10 For fatwas against the Muslim Brothers by leading salafi jurists: J. b. F. alHarithi (ed.), al-Fatawa al-Muhimma fi Tabsir al-Umma (Cairo: Maktabat al-Hady al-Muhammadi, 2009), pp. 182–98; A. A. M. b. Adam (ed. and trans.), The Crime of Hizbiyyah Against Salafi Dawah (Michigan: Sunnah Publishing, 2009), pp. 46–7. 11 On the wasatiyya as an ideological stream: S. Polka, ‘The centrist stream in Egypt and its role in the public discourse surrounding the shaping of the country’s cultural identity’, Middle Eastern Studies, 39:3 (July 2003), 39–64; B. Gräf, ‘The concept of wasatiyya in the work of Yusuf al-Qaradawi’, in B. Gräf and J. Skovgaard-Petersen (eds), Global Mufti: The Phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaradawi (London: Hurst & Company, 2009), pp. 213–38. In wasati writing: Y. alQaradawi, al-Halal wal-Haram fi al-Islam (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, 2004, first edition 1960), pp. 9–11; Y. al-Qaradawi, Min Ajli Sahwa Rashida: Tajaddud al-Din … wa-Tanahhud bi-al-Dunya (Cairo and Beirut: Dar al-Shuruq, 2001), pp. 51–6, 62, 138; Y. al-Qaradawi, Fiqh al-Wasatiyya al-Islamiyya wal-Tajdid, Maalim wa-Manarat (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2010); M. Imara, al-Istiqlal alHadari, pp. 178–9, 197–8; Akram Kassab, al-Manhaj al-Dawi lil-Qaradawi (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, 2006), pp. 237–43, 283–4. 12 For overviews on American fundamentalism: S. G. Cole, The History of Fundamentalism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971 [1931]); J. A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); W. G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America 1607–1977 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 13 The wasati approach to Islamic law is summarized in: Y. al-Qaradawi, Taysir al-Fiqh lil-Muslim al-Muasir (Beirut: Muassasat al-Risala, 2000). See also B. H. E. Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 102–6. 14 On this theory in Islamist literature see for example: Banna, ‘Risala bayna al-ams wal-yawm’, pp. 522–5, M. J. Kishk, al-Ghazw al-Fikri (Kuwait: Maktabat al-Aml, 3rd edition, 1967); A. M. Jarisha and M. S. al-Zaybaq, Asalib alGhazw al-Fikri lil-Alam al-Islami (Cairo: Dar al-Itisam, 1977); M. ­al-Ghazali, al-Ghazw al-Thaqafi Yamtaddu fi Faraghina (Cairo: Dar al-­ Shuruq, 2005 [1998]); Y. al-Qaradawi, al-Hulul al-Mustawrada wa-Kayfa Jannat ala Ummatina (Beirut: Muassasat al-Risala, 1974 [1971]), pp. 15–46; The Hamas Charter (18 August 1988), section 15; M. Qutb, Waqiuna al-Muasir (Cairo:

Introduction

21

Dar al-Shuruq, 2006 [1997]), pp. 182–5; M. M. Akif, ‘Waqafat maa dhikra istishhad al-shahid Hasan al-Banna’ (n.d.): www.ikhwanonline.com/article. asp?ArtID=18036&secid=21 (accessed June 2012). 15 On al-Ghazali’s biography see: K. Muhsin, Misr Bayna al-Dawla al-Islamiyya wal-Dawla al-ilmaniyya (Beirut: Markaz al-Ilam al-Arabi, 1992), pp. 12–13; A. A. al-Khadar, al-Saudiyya Sirat Dawla wa-Mujtama (Beirut: al-Shabaka al-Arabiyya lil-Abhath wal-Nashr, 2010), p. 236; Y. al-Qaradawi, al-Shaykh alGhazali Kama Araftuhu (al-Mansura: Dar al-Wafa lil-Tibaa wal-Nashr walTawzi, 1995), pp. 28, 38–43; R. M. Scott, ‘The role of the ulama in an Islamic order: the early thought of Muhammad al-Ghazali (1916–1996)’, The Maghreb Review, 32:2–3 (2007), 149–72. Also see an internet website dedicated to his work and ideology: www.alghazaly.org/index.php?s=life (accessed June 2012). On al-Qaradawi’s biography: A. Kassab, al-Manhaj al-Dawi inda al-Qaradawi (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, 2006); J. Skovgaard-Petersen, ‘Yusuf al-Qaradawi and al-Azhar’, in Gräf and Skovgaard-Petersen (eds), Global Mufti, pp. 27–53; H. Tammam, ‘Yusuf Qaradawi and the Muslim Brothers: the nature of a special relationship’, in ibid., pp. 55–83; S. Helfont, Yusuf al-Qaradawi: Islam and Modernity (Tel-Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center, 2009); B. Gräf, ‘IslamOnline. net: Independent, interactive, popular’, Arab Media & Society (January 2008), 1–4: http://arabmediasociety.sqgd.co.uk/articles/downloads/20080115032719_ AMS4_Bettina_Graf.pdf (accessed June 2012); U. Shavit, The New Imagined Community: Advanced Media Technologies and the Construction of National and Muslim Identities of Migrants (Brighton, Portland, Vancouver: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), pp. 106, 127–32. 16 On Muhammad Qutb’s biography: al-Khadar, al-Saudiyya Sirat Dawla wa-Mujtama, pp. 228–32. 17 On al-Ghannushi’s biography see: A. S. Tamimi, Rachid Gannouchi: A Democrat within Islamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 18 On the relatively small number of studies that focus on Arab liberalism and the reason for this lacuna: C. Schumann, ‘The “failure” of radical nationalism and the “silence” of liberal thought in the Arab World’, in C. Schumann (ed.), Nationalism and Liberal Thought in the Arab East: Ideology and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 175–9. 19 D. J. Manning, Liberalism (London: J. M. Dent, 1976), pp. 9–56. 20 C. Schumann, ‘Introduction’, in Nationalism and Liberal Thought in the Arab East: Ideology and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 3, and also see: S. Shamir, ‘What does the future hold for the enlightement trend in the Arab World?’, Alpayim, 31 (2007), in Hebrew, p. 141. 21 S. al-Nabulsi, al-Libiraliyyun al-Judud: Jadal Fikri (Cologne: Manshurat alJamal, 2005), pp. 19–20, 43–55. The book is dedicated to the memory of Taha Hussein. 22 A. A. Hussein, ‘Ishkaliyyat al-libiraliyya fi al-Alam al-Arabi’, al-­Dimuqratiyya, 30 (April 2008), 27–8. 23 See in the organization’s profile: www.arab-liberals.net/aboutnal.html (accessed June 2012).

22

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24 Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth, ‘The Egyptian question and its origins: a classic liberal vision’: www.euly.org (accessed June 2012). 25 A. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 67–160, 222–44. 26 Al-Nabulsi, al-Libiraliyyun al-Judud, p. 19. 27 A. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ix. 28 For examples of al-Sayyid’s liberal views see the compilation of his journalistic writings: A. L. al-Sayyid, Mabadi fi al-Siyasa wal-Adab wal-Ijtima (Cairo: 1960(; for an analysis of his ideology: al-Sayyid al-Zayyat, ‘al-Khitab al-libirali inda Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid’, al- Dimuqratiyya, 10 (Summer 2003), 99–111; A. L. A. Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment: 1922–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 65, 220–7; N. Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 90–7. 29 For a discussion on these developments see: U. Shavit, A Dawn of an Old Era: The Imaginary Revolution in the Middle East (Jerusalem: Keter, 2003, in Hebrew), pp. 9–214; The Wars of Democracy: The West and the Arabs from the Fall of Communism to the War in Iraq (Tel-Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center, 2008, in Hebrew), pp. 73–94, 253–80. 30 S. A. Ibrahim, al-Mujtama al-Madani wal-Tahawwul al-Dimuqrati fi al-Watan al-Arabi (Cairo: Dar Qaba lil-Tibaa wal-Nashr wal-Tawzi, 2000), pp. 77–82; for Ibrahim’s definition of civil society see: pp. 16, 75–6. According to Ibrahim, the reign of reason and freedom is the reason for Europe’s achievments since the Renaissance, and civil society is one of those achievements: p. 9. See also: B. Tibi, ‘The cultural underpinning of civil society in Islamic civilization: Islam and democracy – bridges between civilization’, in E. Ozdalga and S. Presson (eds), Civil Society, Democracy and the Muslim World (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 1997), p. 27; For a critical discussion see: A. alAzmeh, ‘Populism contra democracy’, in G. Salame (ed.), Democracy without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 122–4. 31 M. ‘A. al-Jabiri, ‘al-Masala al-dimuqratiyya wal-awda al-rahina fi al-Watan al-Arabi’, al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi, 157 (1992), pp. 14–15. 32 See: Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth, ‘The Egyptian question and its origins: A classic liberal vision’, p. 25; H. Mustafa, ‘Our secular legacy’, al-Ahram Weekly, 673 (15–21 January 2004): http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/673/ op43.htm (accessed June 2012); Tibi, ‘The cultural underpinning of civil society’, pp. 28–31; al-Nabulsi, al-Liberaliyyun al-Judud, pp. 20–66; A. Nur, ‘Mafhum al-libiraliyya’, on the ‘al-Ghad’ party’s website: www.aymannour. net/ShowArticleDetail.aspx?ItemType=2&value=492 (accessed June 2012); See also the discussions of M. Hatina, Islam in Modern Egypt (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Dayan Center, 2000, in Hebrew), pp. 48–165; S. Shamir, ‘Liberalism from monarchy to post-revolution’, in S. Shamir (ed.), Egypt from Monarchy to Republic: Reassessment of Revolution and Change (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1955), pp. 202–5.

Introduction

23

33 See the ‘Introduction to liberalism’ on Ayman Nur’s website: www.aymannour. net/ShowLibraryInfo.aspx. 34 See in the organization’s profile: www.euly.org/en/about/index.html (accessed June 2012). 35 T. Hussein, Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr (Cairo: Matbaat al-Maarif, 1938), pp. 7–51. 36 See for example: K. A. Hasib, ‘Hiwar hawla al-milaff al-iraqi’, al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi, 303 (2004), transcript of an interview given by the author to the satellite network al-Mustaqilla on 25 March 2004, 6–30; ‘al-Mashahid almustaqbiliyya al-muhtamala fi al-Iraq’, ibid., 307 (2004), 6–30; B. Ghalyun, an introduction to the fifth edition in Bayan min Ajli al-Dimuqratiyya (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi, 2006), pp. 18–19. 37 Al-Nabulsi, al-Libiraliyyun al-Judud, pp. 24, 41, 113. 38 The comparative aspect of this quantitative analysis was limited by the different dates when newspapers examined began publication as well as the availability of several volumes to the authors. Responses to the Agranat Committee and the subsequent resignation of Golda Meir were examined in al-Hayah, alNahar and Hadarat al-Islam; to the Entebbe raid in al-Hayah and al-Siyasa; to the 1977 Israeli elections in al-Nahar, al-Dawa and Hadarat al-Islam; to the Kahan commission in al-Siyasa, al-Sharq al-Awsat and al-Shab; to the acquittal of Azat Nafsu in al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Siyasa, al-Ahrar, al-Wafd and Filastin al-Muslima; to Operation Solomon in al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Hayah, Filastin al-Muslima, al-Ahrar and al-Wafd; to the 1992 Israeli elections in al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Hayah, ­ al-Shab, al-Wafd and Filastin al-Muslima; to Israel’s 50th anniversary in al-Hayah, Filastin al-Muslima, al-Wafd, al-Risala and al-Sabil; to the Nobel Prize awarded to Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover in al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Hayah and al-Wafd; to the Nobel Prize awarded to Yisrael Aumann in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Hayah and al-Wafd; to the Nobel Prize awarded to Ada Yonath in al-Hayah, al-Wafd and al-Sabil. 39 Y. Harkabi, The Arabs’ Position in Their Conflict with Israel (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1968, in Hebrew). 40 S. Shamir, Egypt under Sadat: The Search for a New Orientation (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1978, in Hebrew). 41 R. Yadlin and A. Baram, ‘Political pragmatism theorized: Are Arab attitudes to Israel being moderated?’, The New East, 27 (1977), in Hebrew, 1–17; R.  Yadlin, ‘Israel’s image and Egyptian self image as reflected in Egyptian media’, in E.  Gilboa and M. Naor (eds), The Arab–Israeli Conflict (Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defence, 1981, in Hebrew), pp. 346–61; R. Yadlin, An Arrogant Oppressive Spirit: Anti-Zionism as Anti-Judaism in Egypt (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1988, in Hebrew). 42 A. Sela, ‘Politics, identity and peacemaking: The Arab discourse on peace with Israel in the 1990s’, Israel Studies, 10:2 (2005), 15–71. 43 F. Ajami, Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), pp. 252–312.

24

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44 E. Stein, Representing Israel in Modern Egypt: Ideas, Intellectuals and Foreign Policy from Nasser to Mubarak (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). 45 E. Podeh, ‘Israel in the mirror: The portrayal of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Egyptian history textbooks (1952–1998)’, in D. Menashri (ed.), Religion and State in the Middle East (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2006, in Hebrew), pp. 219–50; On Israel’s image in Egyptian and Palestinian textbooks see also: A. Groiss, War and Peace, Israel and the West, in Egyptian Schoolbooks (New York: American Jewish Committee, Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, 2004). 46 Y. Amitay, Egypt and Israel – A Look from the Left: The Egyptian Left and the Arab–Israeli Conflict 1947–1978 (Haifa: University of Haifa Press and Zemorah-Bitan, 1999, in Hebrew). 47 J. L. Eposito and J. O. Voll, Makers of Contemporary Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 5; Johnson’s celebrated definition of intellectuals highlights the secular aspect of this term, and the freedom of the intellectual from the shackles of religious canons; it, too, characterizes an intellectual’s project as one that criticizes society based on the firm conviction that the intellectual knows best the remedies to its illnesses. See P. Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), pp. 1–2. 48 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. S. Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). 49 E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 50 H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 51 D. Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict: Socio-Psychological Analysis of the Jewish Society in Israel (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2007, in Hebrew), pp. 26–43. 52 Ibid., 303–30.

1 Islamism, Zionism and Israel: a war of no compromises and compromises during war Since its inception and through to the present time, one of the appeals of Islamism has been its ability to crystallize complex theological and p ­ olitical ideas into simple and catchy formulae. Accessible to all, these formulae masquerade as clear-cut, unwavering, undeniable truths that are not up for negotiation; their authority originates from divine revelation and is supported by the lessons learned from reality itself. Another appeal of Islamism, particularly from its mainstream wasati political and intellectual branches, is seemingly the reversal of this clear-cut approach. Some Islamist leaders have been willing to agree to pragmatic solutions, which in turn are rationalized by the same theological platform that forms the basis of the ‘unwavering truths’. This ­ideology–practice duality has manifested itself in the tension between the uncompromising demands of Muslim Brothers’ factions to establish rule by sharia law, on the one hand, and their readiness to cooperate with regimes that have failed to answer this call, on the other. Muslim Brothers factions have even participated in elections whose results have led them to serve in parliaments that were not subordinated to the word of God, a practice justified as promoting the foundational objectives of Islamic law and the eventual triumph of Islam. The relationship of the main Islamist movements to Israel and Zionism represents another facet of this duality. Islamists perceive all of Mandatory Palestine as waqf land, an inseparable limb and an indispensable link in the future unity of the Muslim nation. According to Islamist views, the Jewish takeover of Palestine was an act of usurpation and Jewish sovereignty over any piece of its land is illegitimate; therefore, peace with Israel and even acknowledging its existence are considered fallacious. Furthermore, each and every Muslim has a personal obligation to wage jihad against Israel until its destruction, which can be attained only when faith becomes the guiding light that reawakens the Muslim world. However, despite this ideological stance that leaves little room for compromise between Israel and the Arab

26

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world, the actual policy of Islamist factions is more complex. In addition to their participation in violent campaigns against Israel since the 1940s and their spearheading of efforts to foil negotiations with Israeli governments, Islamist movements have also taken more pragmatic approaches. These approaches include the willingness to avoid the immediate cancellation of peace treaties and to negotiate short-tem ceasefires, as well as the suspension of the struggle against Israel in favour of other struggles. This chapter offers a chronological overview of the Islamist ideological opposition to Zionism. It portrays the main characteristics of and driving forces behind this resistance and explores the different pragmatic approaches toward Israel that have developed in the various epochs of Islamist thought, particularly in relation to previously signed agreements with Israel.

Islamism, Zionism and Israel: a chronological panoramic view Islamist opposition to the Zionist idea is as old as Islamism itself. Hasan al-Banna established the Muslim Brothers as a reaction to Western political and cultural control over the Muslim world and he envisioned an Islamist state that will unite Muslim societies. The Jewish ambition to build a national home in the land of Israel (i.e. in the heart of the Muslim world) was in complete contradiction to the Islamist vision for the future of Muslims. The origins of the resistance to the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine are therefore simple enough: for the Islamist dream to live, the Jewish one had to die. Al-Banna was interested in the subject of Palestine even before he established the Muslim Brothers. As early as 1927, he sent a letter of solidarity to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. During the Muslim Brothers’ formative years, they prioritized efforts to defend the holy places in Jerusalem, prevent the acquisition of Arab lands by Jews and curb Jewish immigration. In August 1935 two delegates of the movement were sent to spread its teachings in Palestine, marking the first time that the Muslim Brothers had ventured outside of Egypt.1 At the height of the Arab Revolt in Palestine in May 1936, the Muslim Brothers formed an aid committee to Palestine, led by Hasan al-Banna himself. The committee embarked on a wide-scale operation in support of the Palestinian cause that included collecting donations for the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine, informational activities in mosques and schools and even composing a special prayer for the salvation of the people of Palestine and the defeat of their enemies. The Palestinian

Islamism, Zionism and Israel

27

issue had become a symbol of the Brothers’ resistance to the government and to British control over the Middle East. In July 1937, in the light of the publication of the Peel Commission report that supported the partition of Palestine, the Muslim Brothers escalated the struggle through the publication of a special edition of the movement’s journal dedicated to Palestine, political leaflets distributed at universities, stores and cafés, and banners depicting the terror in Palestine that were hung from the walls of buildings and mosques. The anti-Zionist activities also promoted bans on Jewish businesses in Egypt – claiming that they were assisting Zionism – and anti-Semitic sentiments blaming Egyptian Jewry for the crisis that had transpired. On 2 November 1937, in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, al-Banna sent a letter to the British ambassador to Egypt demanding a halt to Jewish immigration to Palestine and the establishment of an Arab state in which Jews would be granted minority rights. He warned Britain that if it did not comply it would lose the friendship of the Muslim world for all eternity. At the same time, al-Banna called on the Egyptian government to solve the Palestinian problem and prevent aggression toward Palestine’s Arab population. The Muslim Brothers’ criticism of the British and Egyptian governments continued with their distribution of tens of thousands of copies of the booklet al-Nar wal-Damar fi Filastin (The Fire and the Ruin in Palestine), which described British crimes against the Arab rebellion. The distribution of the booklet led to the arrest of al-Banna.2 On 2 February 1939, with the decline of the Arab Revolt, alBanna delivered a comprehensive policy speech at the Brothers’ Fifth Conference, where he intensified his criticism of Britain. He concluded that Muslims must unite to banish any aggression against one of the Muslim states, expressly warned Britain to cease attacking the people of Palestine and infringing their rights and noted that Palestine was the land of every Muslim by virtue of its being a Muslim country that was home to the prophets and is the home of al-Aqsa mosque. In his speech he conveyed his belief that Egypt would never gain independence and freedom from imperialistic rule unless it used the ‘language most understood’, the language of power. His focus on the Palestine issue demonstrated that, in his eyes, it had become inseparable from the struggle against Western domination of the Muslim world.3 On 15 September 1939, al-Banna issued another letter to the Egyptian Prime Minister Ali Mahir, in which he called on him to demand the British to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine, to recognize the independence of Palestine as an Arab and Muslim state and to pardon all prisoners, exiles and Arab fighters.4

28

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The Muslim Brothers’ opposition to Jewish sovereignty over any part of Palestine intensified after the decision by the United Nations to partition the land on 29 November 1947. In a demonstration of half a million people in Cairo following the decision, al-Banna called on Egyptian youth to join a jihad to prevent the implementation of the decision.5 Initiated by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brothers in 1947, the National Covenant also conveyed total resistance to the partition of Palestine and called on the Jewish immigrants to return to their countries of origin and give back their land and possessions to the Arab population. On 31 December of that year, the Syrian Muslim Brothers presented Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatli with a memorandum that demanded a fight against the partition plan, collection of taxes to fund the struggle against Zionism, a boycott of Zionist products and the imposition of sanctions on Jews in Syria for their collaboration with the Zionist movement.6 Al-Banna’s essay on jihad, published in 1948 in the context of the war over Palestine, constituted a call to arms and a song of praise to sacrifice one’s life on the altar of Islam’s struggles. At the core of the essay was a discussion of jihad and its terms, through which al-Banna asserted the personal obligation (fard ayn) of every able Muslim to fight an aggressor who conquers a Muslim land. Since this obligation is a personal one, a woman does not have to seek her husband’s permission to go to war, nor do slaves from their masters, sons from their fathers or debtholders from their creditors. In this essay al-Banna refuted the argument that the Prophet believed that one’s struggle against oneself and one’s desires constitutes the greater jihad, while the jihad against the enemies of Islam is secondary to it.7 While the essay was not a direct call to wage war against the Zionist enemy, the Jewish–Arab conflict overshadowed every syllable of it. Several hundred Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian Brothers volunteered to fight in their countries’ armies in the campaign over Palestine.8 In a pamphlet published by the Egyptian Muslim Brothers in the midst of the war, they called upon Arab and Islamic governments and nations to persist with the jihad until the land of Palestine was freed, offering to serve as ‘a vanguard of jihadist warriors’. They rejected any diplomatic solution that recognized the State of Israel and warned Arab rulers that accepting a ceasefire or international custody over Palestine would be considered an ‘act of treason’ and possibly lead to a public uprising against them.9 On 25 July 1948, the founder of the Syrian Muslim Brothers, who had commanded a platoon during the war, Mustafa al-Sibai, called on Arab countries to end the lull in fighting, devote all of their resources towards the campaign in Palestine and recruit the masses until victory was achieved.10

Islamism, Zionism and Israel

29

Historical research assigns limited significance to the role that the Brothers played in the war of 1948;11 however, contemporary Islamists venerate this role as a turning point in Middle Eastern history. According to a common narrative in Islamist writing, the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, Syria and Jordan quickly identified the Zionist threat, prepared accordingly and won significant achievements in the battles they took part in, while Arab regimes betrayed their duty, neglected appropriate war preparations and prevented thousands of Islamists from participating in the fighting.12 According to another, more radical Islamist narrative, the courage that the Brothers demonstrated on the battlefield caused concern among the Jews; fearing that the Brothers would rise to power and endanger Israel, the Jews hatched a scheme with the United States to bring to power the secular Jamal Abd al-Nasser.13 When the results of the war became evident, the Brothers attributed the military defeat to the secular nature of Arab regimes, blaming Arab governments and armies for the failure and even accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers against Palestine. In December 1948, the Egyptian Prime Minister, Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi, outlawed the Brothers and ordered the arrest of al-Banna. In response to the decision to dismantle his movement, al-Banna declared that international Jewry, communism, colonialist countries and atheists were supporting King Faruq and viewed the Brothers as an obstacle to achieving their ambitions.14 Al-Sibai accused ‘Arab officials who are connected to imperialist countries and subordinate to them’ of treason that had led to the disaster in Palestine. He claimed that the Arab Liberation Army had been formed by the Arab League only for the sake of quieting the discontent of the Arab publics, but not to prevent the fall of Palestine into Jewish hands. He testified that the Syrian government had prevented the movement’s volunteers from enlisting in the war and had refused to supply them with weapons and ammunition.15 The Free Officers Revolution in Egypt in July 1952 did not change the fundamental principles of the Muslim Brothers with regard to Israel. Representatives of the movement in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Iraq gathered in December 1953 for a General Islamic Conference in East Jerusalem and drafted a unified position. They defined the jihad to defend Palestine as the personal duty of every Muslim, objected to any recognition of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, rejected the option of signing a peace treaty or other diplomatic arrangements between Arab countries and Israel and warned that the internationalization of Jerusalem was a conspiracy against Muslims and that imperialist powers supporting the establishment of the State of Israel should be wary of a Muslim response.16

30

Zionism in Arab discourses

The Brothers’ hope of hijacking the revolution in Egypt was dashed when their clash with the Free Officers culminated in a string of arrests in October 1954 and a socialist pan-Arab Egyptian president claimed absolute victory. In the thirteen years that followed, the Israeli–Arab conflict revolved around the charismatic Nasserist promise to eliminate the Zionist state. On the eve of the Six Day War, many in the Arab world were convinced that they would spend their next summer holiday on the beaches of Tel Aviv, a scenario that was also deemed possible by some Israelis. Persecuted, defeated and torn inwardly, the Egyptian Muslim Brothers became a minority voice in the coalition against Israel, which was similarly the case for branches of the Brothers operating in other Arab countries. The Six Day War resulted in a resounding Arab defeat that signalled the end of progressive pan-Arabism as the dominant force in Arab politics, although it would continue to wane as empty rhetoric for decades to come. Seen through an Islamist prism, the humiliation of the Six Day War served as a vindication of the principles of al-Banna’s ideology. In the literature that became popular after the war, Islamists claimed that the Arab coalition had been overwhelmed because it had been led by regimes that had forsaken religion in favour of heretic ideologies. While the defeat had been predictable, it should not be credited to true Arabs but, rather, to Arabs possessed of a foreign outlook and leaders who disavowed their identity. The Islamist journalist Muhammad Jalal Kishk (1929–93) was quick to publish a new edition of his book about the West’s ‘ideological attack’, which in its original version had intended to attribute the achievements of the Algerian national struggle to a firm belief in Islam. He argued that the military defeat was an unavoidable consequence of the cultural defeat the Arabs had suffered when they adopted foreign secular ideologies. There was no road to victory other than a return to Islam.17 Yusuf al-Qaradawi, relatively unknown during this period, proclaimed similar ideas in a book that he published after the war on the lessons of the ‘Second Nakba’. The Arab nation’s defeat at the hands of Zionists was not due to its technological underdevelopment, military mistakes or treason; it had been defeated in 1967 for the same reasons as in 1948 – it had lost itself and its identity by neglecting Allah and forsaking His path and decrees. According to the book, abandonment of the faith had created a rift between the rulers, who had adopted secular ideologies, and the oppressed masses, who had remained faithful to Islam; had divided different social groups, even families that were once united under Islam; had caused the release of desires and the tyranny of vulgar lusts; and had led Muslims into battle deprived of the power of faith. The only way to victory was the one that

Islamism, Zionism and Israel

31

had led to triumph against the Crusaders and the Mongols: the path of jihad in the name of faith.18 This point of view was widely received by an Arab world eager to find answers after the war. The appeasing apologetics offered by Islamists is one of the reasons for the ‘Age of Awakening’ (al-Sahwa or al-Nahda), which in Islamist literature refers to the period starting in the late 1960s of religious revival and growth in the power of movements demanding a return to the rule of Islam. The idea that Israel is a sustainable entity that should be negotiated and peacefully coexisted with has neither a trace nor a faint echo in post-Six Day War Islamist writing. In the aftermath of the war, insistence of Israel’s illegitimacy was not the exception in the Arab world. Nevertheless, Nasser, defeated but still loved by the public, delivered ambivalent messages that left room for the interpretation that Egypt’s main goal was to retrieve the territories lost in 1967 through a diplomatic process. At the Arab Summit that took place in Khartoum in September 1967, he played a mediating role when he resisted the PLO’s demand to formulate a plan for total struggle against Israel. Instead, he led the Summit to approve a resolution calling for the withdrawal of the enemy from the territories it was occupying through international diplomatic action. Yet the resolution came with three resounding negations that emphasized that even when victorious, the Zionist state remained illegitimate in Arab eyes – no to peace with Israel; no to recognition of Israel; and no to negotiations with Israel.19 These three refusals demonstrated that the Islamist objection to the existence of Israel remained at the heart of the Arab consensus. This general accord gradually dissipated. The first signs could be found prior to the Yom Kippur War, when Egypt hesitantly signalled that it was open to a ‘land for peace’ agreement – both during the twilight days of the Nasser regime and during the rule of his successor, Anwar al-Sadat. In December 1973, two months after the end of the war, a peace summit began in Geneva with the participation of the United States, the Soviet Union, Israel, Egypt and Jordan, but no substantial results were achieved. In June 1974, the PLO accepted the ‘Phased Plan’ that did not concede the claim for the entirety of Palestine, but legitimized the establishment of a ‘temporary’ Palestinian authority in any ‘part of the homeland’ that could be liberated. In September 1975 an Israeli–Egyptian interim agreement was signed in which both sides confirmed that the dispute between them would be resolved peacefully. The final brick in the wall of consensus over the need to eliminate Israel fell in November 1977 when Sadat flew to Jerusalem and, in a celebratory speech to the Israeli Parliament, proposed a peace agreement and the normalization of relations between the countries in exchange for a

32

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full withdrawal from the territories Israel had conquered in 1967. The Egyptian President embarked on his peace initiative from a position of strength, as the first ruler to lead Egypt to achievements in the battlefield against Israel (albeit temporary and limited) and after he had stabilized his regime on the basis of pragmatic policy. His initiative, which came to fruition in the signing of the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty in April 1979, represented a conceptual revolution. What he offered to the Israelis was greater than a ceasefire, truce or interim arrangement; it was a finite and comprehensive peace treaty between two states that included cultural and scientific clauses and implied Egyptian recognition of Israel’s right to exist. At first, the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty did not revolutionize the approaches of other Arab countries to the conflict. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League and, except in the writings of a handful of liberals and officials within the Egyptian administration, the treaty was considered an act of treason. This was also the opinion of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, who were granted relative leeway to operate by al-Sadat. On 10 May 1979, the heads of al-Azhar University published an essay in al-Ahram stating that the Egyptian–Israeli peace agreement concurred with Islamic law. About six months later, Egypt’s Mufti Jadd al-Haqq Ali Jadd al-Haqq published a detailed religious decree supporting the agreement.20 In response, the Muslim Brothers blamed the regime for making improper political use of the religious authorities, who had been subjugated to it in order to legitimize a policy that contradicted Islamic law as well as the desires of the majority of the Egyptian people. In opposition to the decree of the religious establishment that peace agreements with non-Muslims are allowed in Islam, based on the precedents of the Treaty of Hudaybiyya and the peace treaty signed by the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of Medina, the Brothers declared these two treaties to be irrelevant examples, as they had not been signed under the circumstances of occupied Muslim land and deported Muslim people.21 In opposition to the view that Egypt had reached the peace agreement with Israel from a position of strength after the ‘victory’ in the October 1973 war, the Brothers claimed that the treaty had been forced upon an Egypt that was in a position of surrender, humiliation and weakness, and that it therefore contradicted Islamic law.22 Opposing the understanding that international circumstances prevented a war against an Israel that had become an extant fact on the ground, the Brothers maintained that such thinking would lead to submission, passivity and despair.23 Finally, opposing the view that peace constitutes an Islamic moral ideal and should be preferred, if possible, over war, the Brothers claimed that the preaching of humanistic values was an attempt to

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obscure the differences between Islam and other religions and repudiated the self and the faith of the Muslim.24 Despite their firm opposition, the Brothers refrained from embarking on an armed struggle against the regime or targeting Israelis. However, on 6 October 1981 the Egyptian Jihad Organization, one of the Qutbinspired factions that had branched off from the Brothers and striven to take over the government from within, orchestrated the assassination of al-Sadat. Peace survived the assassination, even though its cultural elements were almost eradicated and it became a ‘cold peace’. When the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty was signed, the Muslim Brothers’ utter opposition to it was at the heart of Arab consensus, but as the years passed this consensus was also undermined. The guiding principle of the Egyptian peace initiative – peace with Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from the lands it had occupied in 1967 – gradually became the guiding diplomatic principle for its neighbours and the leadership of Fatah, the hegemonic movement within the PLO. In 1981 Fahd, the Saudi Crown Prince, suggested a diplomatic platform based on this principle. In April 1987 a secret agreement was signed between the Israeli Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, and King Hussein of Jordan that was supposed to convene an international summit, at which Jordan would represent the Palestinians, based on the ‘land for peace’ formula; however, the agreement was never implemented. In 1988 the PLO declared the symbolic foundation of a Palestinian state. This declaration relied on UN resolutions, among other things, and particularly on General Assembly Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. In October 1991 an international conference commenced in Madrid, through which bilateral and multilateral talks were launched between Israel and its neighbours, including Syria, on the basis of the ‘land for peace’ formula. In September 1993 the negotiations between Israel and the PLO led to the signing of a Declaration of Principles (the Oslo Accords) for an Israeli-Palestinian peace and the founding of a Palestinian Authority alongside Israel. The negotiations between Israel and Jordan led to the signing of a peace accord in October 1994. While volatile protracted negotiations with Syria under the rule of Hafiz al-Assad did not witness a breakthrough, they were nonetheless dictated by the ‘land for peace’ principle. An overall evaluation of the Arab–Israeli peace talks from the mid1980s until the Arab Spring of 2011 tells of much hesitation, missed opportunities, ambiguity and frustration; the Oslo Accords collapsed, a peace agreement between Israel and Syria was never signed and no overarching arrangement for ending the conflict was reached. Yet, from a broad historical perspective, the Sadat peace initiative ushered in one

34

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significant change that contradicted the position represented in the Khartoum Summit – the gradual recognition in Arab politics, at the very least on a rhetorical and diplomatic level, that acknowledgement of, and negotiations and peace making with, Israel are legitimate. Islamist movements consistently, decisively and unequivocally opposed this development. From the mid-1980s until the present, they have maintained their sheer rejection of the existence of Israel, opposed any negotiation that hints at its right to exist and presented jihad time and again as the only way to ensure Muslim rights over all of Palestine. According to the Islamist position, the conflict is religious, as Palestine is waqf land that no Muslim has the right to surrender. In November 1991, following the Madrid Conference, the preacher and Egyptian Muslim Brothers member Wajdi Ghunaym determined that anything short of jihad would not return Jerusalem to the Muslims and quoted the Quran: ‘The Jews and Christians will never be pleased with you until you follow their way’ (2:120).25 Muhammad al-Ghazali said that war between Jews and Arabs would carry on until the hour of victory. He hoped that the inner-Islamic front would be strengthened by the Madrid Conference and that within a few years it would be ready to stand on solid ground to face the Zionist enemy.26 After the signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO, Mustafa Mashhur (1921–2002), Vice General Guide of the Muslim Brothers and General Guide from 1996 to 2002, determined that the Palestinian problem was one of ‘all Islamic nations’ and warned Arab leaders, ‘do not betray Allah, his messenger, and your people by giving the enemy permission to occupy Palestine, Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa mosque, the first of two qiblas [the direction of prayer] and the third holiest place to Islam’.27 Muhammad Abu al-Nasr (b. 1913), the General Guide of the Egyptian Brothers from 1986 until his death in 1996, wrote similarly about the Declaration of Principles, claiming that ‘the problem of Palestine and the liberation of all Arabic and Islamic lands should not be negotiable nor the object of temporary political gains, but serve as a principle and source of faith for the Muslim Brothers’.28 In May 1994, after the signing of the Cairo agreement for the implementation of the first stage of the Declaration of Principles (through a transfer of Gaza and Jericho to Palestinian control), a Jordanian member of Parliament representing the Muslim Brothers, Abd al-Aziz Jabir, called it the ‘darkest day in history’ of the Muslim nation that surpassed even the ‘day Arabs and Muslims left Andalucía’.29 A statement issued by the Brothers in Jordan emphasized that the only way to liberate Arab and Muslim lands and to return honour and glory to the Muslim nation was jihad.30 A statement issued by the Brothers in Syria

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promised that the Muslim nation was ready for jihad ‘until the last inch of Palestinian land is liberated’, land that no man was allowed to surrender, as it was sacred Islamic land.31 The Brothers in Egypt denounced the agreement and said that ‘the issue of Palestine – the whole of Palestine – is the responsibility of all Muslims and liberating this holy land is an obligation of every Muslim man or woman’.32 The failure of the Oslo Accords, signalled by the collapse of IsraeliPalestinian peace talks at Camp David in July 2000 and the al-Aqsa intifada that began shortly thereafter, reinforced in Islamist eyes the paradigmatic stance that wholly opposed negotiating for peace with Israel. Muslim Brothers organizations consistently resisted both the alreadysigned agreements and renewed attempts for an Israeli–Palestinian agreement based on the ‘land for peace’ formula. The Arab Peace Initiative (the Arab League plan approved in March 2002, whose essence is to end the conflict in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders and a solution to the refugee problem) was hostilely received. The leader of the Brothers in Jordan, Abd Al-Majid Dhunaybat, denounced it (even though he did not name it specifically), saying that the Palestinian people did not need ‘meagre initiatives that acknowledge the right of Jews over eighty per cent of Palestine and relinquish the Right of Return’, and that only jihad could lead to the liberation of Palestine.33 Ahmad al-Zarqan, member of the executive branch of the Muslim Brothers in Jordan, rejected ‘surrender initiatives’ and called upon the kingdom to cancel its peace agreement with Israel, while simultaneously warming the hearts of the Jordanian people toward a holy war.34 Mustafa Mashhur defined the initiative as a ‘big sin and a crime’ against the whole Muslim nation and its rights.35 His successor in the leadership of the Egyptian Brothers, Muhammad Mamun al-Hudaybi (1921–2004), determined in 2003 that the Palestinian issue is central to the agenda of the movement and its support of the Palestinian struggle relies on two pillars – the religious duty to other Muslims and to safeguard the holy places, and the national duty to defend Egypt from ‘Israel’ (quotations in the original), which threatens its national security.36 In 2007, Muhammad Mahdi Akif, the General Guide of the Egyptian Brothers from 2004 to 2010, declared that ‘our vocabulary does not include anything that is called Israel. We only acknowledge the existence of Jewish gangs that have occupied Arab lands and banished its inhabitants. If [the Jews] will want to live among us they will have to be citizens of Palestine. If they will want their own state, we will not have a choice but to oppose it.’37 Since the mid-1980s, Palestinian Islamist movements have stood at the forefront of Islamist resistance to negotiations with and recognition of Israel. This dominance has marked a reversal of the stature of Palestinian

36

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Islamists within the conflict. In the 1970s nationalistic secular forces dominated the Palestinian national struggle and the main opposition to the relative moderation of the PLO came from radical leftist Palestinian organizations. The voice of the Palestinian Muslim Brothers was practically mute and they did not believe that Palestinians had a unique position within the Islamist struggle against Zionism. In the early 1980s, capitalizing on the religious awakening occurring in the West Bank and Gaza since the early 1970s and, just as importantly, on Israel’s support for a counterbalance to the PLO on the Palestinian street, educational, welfare and proselytizing enterprises led by the Muslim Brothers rose in prominence, especially in Gaza. However, their political stature remained diminutive. With the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada on 9 December 1987, there was a shift in that balance. On the second day of the uprising, Sheikh Ahmad Yasin (1936–2004) and his co-leaders in the Muslim Brothers in Gaza formed the Palestinian Resistance Movement, or Hamas, which defined itself as the branch of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The literal meaning of Hamas (‘enthusiasm’) is indicative of the new militant nature of the Palestinian Brothers. From the beginning of the uprising, the mosques, college campuses and welfare enterprises controlled by Hamas were an integral factor in its organization.38 Following the signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO in 1993, Hamas (and also, to a lesser degree, the Islamic Jihad under the leadership of Fathi al-Shqaqi) became the main opposition to the diplomatic process between Israel and the PLO, and its terror attacks became a main obstacle to moving that process forward. In the years since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada, Hamas has become an armed political entity equal in power to Fatah, won a free election to the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority in January 2006 and violently took over the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Utilizing identical rhetoric to that adopted by the Muslim Brothers from the 1930s, Hamas, from the day of its inception, objected to Muslim recognition of any Jewish sovereignty over Palestine and demanded a violent jihad to eradicate this sovereignty. At its founding meeting, Hamas determined that its mission was to liberate the land of Palestine and return it to Islamic rule through a holy war against Jews and Zionists; to oppose the Zionist enemy and embark on a jihad as a  personal duty imposed on every Muslim; to object to any form of peace initiatives, as they entail relinquishing parts of Palestine, and to adopt jihad as the only way to regain control over Palestinian lands; and to accuse of treason any Arab party that negotiates with Israel.39 Hamas’ objection to any Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel was ratified in the movement’s charter, approved on August 1988 by Sheikh

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Yasin. The charter called for the flag of Allah to be raised over all parts of Palestine because it is waqf land and Jerusalem is the third-holiest place in Islam.40 It defined any peaceful resolution of the conflict with Zionism as a ‘principal betrayal’ and determined that according to religious law no Muslim is allowed to formulate a compromise agreement with Israel: The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is Islamic waqf [for] generations of Muslims until judgement day. All, or parts of it, should not be squandered, and all or parts of it should not be given up. No Arab country, nor all Arab countries are allowed to do so, no king or president, nor all kings and all presidents, no organization nor all organizations, whether Palestinian or Arab […] Initiatives and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement […] There is no solution to the issue of Palestine other than jihad.41

In December 1988, a few months after the publication of the Hamas charter, the Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine composed its own charter. The movement, led by Fathi al-Shqaqi (1951–95), was distinct among the group of small jihadist organizations that split from the Palestinian Muslim Brothers. In following Sayyid Qutb, its members adopted a stance whose principles forsook the effort to ‘warm the hearts and minds’ of the masses and replaced it with a jihad of an elite vanguard. In the short term, the movement’s charter called for the elimination of the Zionist enterprise, the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of an Islamic state on its land through an armed struggle. In the long term, it strives to meet the cultural challenge posed by the West, to establish an Islamic Caliphate and to implement Islamic law all over the world.42 The principles and goals of the document declare that Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’ is Islamic Arab land and the presence of the Zionist enterprise on any part of that land is unacceptable according to religious law. Therefore, ‘any compromise proposals that acknowledge Zionist presence in Palestine or include a concession on any of the rights of the nation [in Palestine] are null and void’.43 Al-Shqaqi emphasized that the much-awaited peace in the region would be attained only with the termination of the State of Israel: We are men of peace, we seek peace, but the world and the arrogant, colonialist West must understand that the first condition for peace is the dismantling of the cursed settlement the West has established across Palestine and called ‘Israel.’ If this settlement will not be dismantled, then we shall continue with war and the region and the world will never be calm […]

38

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This is the first and last warning, and the West must listen! There will not be peace without the rectification of the sin committed [by the West] since World War I, as this sin was based on terror, on the illusion of power and on arrogance. We have no choice but to continue with our jihad until the Zionist enterprise is dismantled in Palestine and in the region, so that true peace can prevail.44

Since diplomatic negotiations began between Israel and representatives of the Palestinian national movement, senior Palestinian Islamists have repeated ideas identical to those in Hamas’ and Islamic Jihad’s founding documents. An announcement published by Hamas on 5 May 1991, when American efforts to assemble an international peace summit based on the ‘land for peace’ formula were in full swing, stated: ‘The problem of Palestine is a problem of faith and religion, and not a problem of earth and mud. Palestine is a land whose sanctity comes after [the sanctity of] Mecca and Medina, and therefore to give up a mound of its earth is to give up the faith of the Muslim nation, and the faith in Allah and his Messenger.’ On 7 October of that year, on the eve of the Madrid Conference, the movement determined that ‘the peace summit is a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and the victims of the uprising, and a profanation against Allah’.45 Two years later, when secret negotiations developed into the signing of the Declaration of Principles, an article in Hamas’ journal Filastin al-Muslima stated that the agreement was ‘the biggest defeat of the nation, not only in the twentieth century but perhaps in the last few centuries’, and in a consoling tone promised: ‘The defeat must be complete before the journey toward the light can begin. The traitors need to remove their masks in order for the nation to discover its true path.’46 An announcement issued by the movement warned: ‘We emphasize our objection to the Gaza–Jericho conspiracy and to any solution that gives up one lump of land from our land, and we are determined to foil it and continue to escalate the resistance and jihad against the occupation.’47 Fathi al-Shqaqi defined the Declaration of Principles similarly, as a betrayal of the Arab and Muslim nation.48 He explained that Islam, which does not guide the PLO, is an ideology that must serve as a point of departure for the Palestinians.49 He defined the Cairo agreement as surrender to the enemy and promised that the jihad would continue.50 In the span of eight months between the signing of the Declaration of Principles and the signing of the Cairo agreement, Hamas murdered thirty-six Israelis.51 Opposition to the implementation of the first stage of the Declaration of Principles was rationalized by the fact that it fulfils ‘none of the ambitions and demands of the Palestinian people for liberation, returning home, self-definition, and

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the establishment of an Arab Islamic state over all of the sacred land of Palestine’.52 Ibrahim al-Maqadma (1952–2003) was a dentist by profession and one of Hamas’ most prominent ideologists from the signing of the Oslo Accords until he was assassinated by the Israel Defence Force (IDF). In a book published in 1994, he explained why peacefully gaining sovereignty over territories in Palestine is not the solution: ‘He who can liberate one per cent of Palestinian land by force can liberate the rest [of the land] with the help of Allah, while he who cannot liberate one per cent by the use of force will never be able to [truly] lead to the liberation of an inch of its land.’53 Al-Maqadma clarified that the violent Palestinian jihad would cease only with the termination of the existence of Israel: ‘We simply tell the Jews, “leave our land and stop your hostility toward us.” Afterwards, Hamas promises it will not pursue you in Russia or in the United States.’54 On the eve of the Camp David Summit, where the prime minister of Israel and the head of the PLO, with American mediators, engaged in a last-ditch effort to reach a comprehensive solution to the conflict, Hamas warned the leadership of the Palestinian Authority against falling into the ‘trap’ of signing a permanent agreement,55 emphasizing that only the way of jihad would lead to Israeli withdrawal.56 After the failure of the Summit in July 2000, Hamas leader Ahmad Yasin declared that the Palestinians should not have participated at all, and that its failure proved that what had been taken by force would only be returned by force. A senior member of the movement, Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi, promised that if Hamas were allowed to act according to the codes of jihad for a span of five years, the movement would achieve the liberation of all of Palestine.57 Hamas’ response to the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002 warned that, as a tactical step, one could accept the initiative, yet if it was a strategic step, and acknowledged Israel’s right to exist, it should be regarded as a ‘holocaust for the Arab and Muslim nation’ because ‘it is impossible that any Palestinian will give up one speck of the land of Palestine’.58 The movement’s platform for its successful parliamentary bid in January 2006 declared that ‘historic Palestine is part of Arab and Islamic lands and is a right that belongs to the Palestinian people with no statute of limitation, and no military or false legal action will change that’; yet the platform remained ambiguous regarding the necessity of armed struggle against Israel.59 When the Arab League was on the verge of ratifying the Arab Peace Initiative at its summit in Riyadh in 2007, Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza Ismail Haniya (b. 1963) clarified that Hamas’ objection to the initiative was a fait accompli because recognizing Israel was totally unacceptable for the movement, whose way is the way of jihad.60

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Islamism and Zionism between the historical and the metahistorical A contemporary observer may spontaneously wonder about the persistent nature of the Islamist demand for the destruction of Israel. When al-Banna first formulated his view on the conflict, Jews in Israel were a minority under the British Mandate, the Zionist movement had yet to achieve unwavering international support for its demand for sovereignty over part of the land and its leaders were uncertain of their ability to militarily safeguard such sovereignty if they obtained it. When contemporary Islamists formulate their beliefs with regard to Israel, they refer to a military, scientific and technological regional power whose gross domestic product is greater than that all of its neighbours combined and that has at its disposal unconventional weapons which ensure that its annihilation is not possible without the ensuing annihilation of its enemies. As we shall observe in the next chapter, Zionist achievements and the Zionists’ robustness in many areas do not go unnoticed by Islamist thinkers. Therefore, it is natural to ponder why the dramatic shift in power between the sides has not been represented in Islamists’ fundamental view of Israel and why their unwavering ideological rejection of Jewish sovereignty, as well as their conviction that armed struggle is the means to its destruction, have remained strong, inalienable truths, to the degree that one can replace al-Banna’s writing with a contemporary Islamist piece without realizing that eight dramatic decades have passed between them. An explanation that comes to mind is the role of the religious canonical element in the Islamist perception; since the outlook that calls for the annihilation of Israel relies on a sacred source of authority, cemented in the writings of an ideological founding father, Islamists are unable to renounce it. This explanation has merit, yet it cannot be accepted as the sole rationale. Adaptation of al-Banna’s religious-political approaches to shifting realities is foundational to mainstream Islamist thought, and was implemented also with regard to core issues that al-Banna encountered. For instance, al-Banna’s rejection of multi-party politics, which he considered to contradict the teachings of Islam,61 was dismissed by prominent contemporary thinkers.62 A complementary explanation for the consistency of the Islamist demand for the annihilation of Israel is a convergence of historical and meta-historical perspectives on the conflict, which is unique to this worldview. The historical perspectives are the lack of an experience of defeat and the revolutionary-oppositional nature of Islamist movements. The meta-historical perspectives are the conspiracy theory of the

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‘cultural attack’ and the anti-Semitism of the Islamist worldview. While the historical points of view give Islamists political motivation to remain steadfast in their fundamental opposition to the existence of Israel, the meta-historical points of view render it difficult for them to examine the Zionist opponent in a rational and realistic manner. Since their inception and until the outbreak of the Arab Spring, Islamist movements have failed time and again in their attempts to usurp the governments of Arab states. The defeats have confronted the Islamist ideology with a difficult theoretical challenge: if Islamists are the true interpreters of the word and will of God, how can one explain their continuous defeats? However, a benefit of those defeats is one that is reaped by veteran opposition movements in general: as Islamist movements have never been in positions of leadership, they have not been held accountable for the catastrophes. Since the solution that they have repeatedly offered as the key to dealing with Israel – identical to their solution to all of the problems plaguing Arab societies: a complete return to Islam as an all-encompassing and binding guide – has never been practically tested in any round of hostility between states, its credibility has remained intact. Furthermore, the single front where Muslim Brothers have led the struggle against Israel has garnered some credibility for the contentious view that implementing the Islamist worldview will increase the possibility of annihilating the Zionist enterprise. Hamas has won achievements in its violent struggle, including maintenance of its armed infrastructure and its hold on Gaza, despite Israeli attacks on it, and the release of a thousand Palestinian prisoners (some of whom are responsible for the killing of dozens of civilians) in exchange for the release of one kidnapped Israeli soldier following prolonged negotiations and in contradiction of Israel’s preliminary statements. All of the above has been achieved even though its terrorist acts within Israel have played an integral role in derailing Israeli–Palestinian diplomatic processes and despite its prolonged campaigns of rocket fire against civilian communities in the south of Israel after the demise of the Oslo process. Reinforcing the linkage between the Islamist way of jihad and victory in the struggle against Zionism have been the achievements of Shiite Hizballah, which caused the IDF to withdraw from the ‘Security Corridor’ in the south of Lebanon in May 2000 and forced Israel into a protracted campaign in the summer of 2006 that ended with no clear winner, despite the Israeli army’s superior might. Statements by the leaders of Hamas demonstrate that at least in their eyes the historical experience proves that the jihad ideology is more effective than the ‘land for peace’ formula. Ibrahim Ghawsha,

42

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a member of Hamas’ political bureau and its spokesperson, described Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon ‘with its tail between its legs’ as the only withdrawal ever achieved not as part of an agreement that imposes concessions on the other side. He added that this victory teaches us that former defeats were due not to Arab weakness but, rather, to Arab division and the lack of determination to embark on a jihad.63 Hamas understood similarly Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza five years later. Ranking Hamas official Mahmud al-Zahhar expressed pride that Hamas, not the PLO, had caused the expulsion of the IDF and settlements from the Gaza Strip and boasted that the movement was skilled at controlling the levels of the flames in the struggle against the Zionist enemy, in accordance with Palestinian interests.64 Al-Zahhar credited these a­chievements to the Islamic nature of the struggle led by Hamas: We in Hamas have raised the flag of a lofty idea that is the liberation of all Palestinian land from the Zionist enemy. This idea led by Hamas proves its success on all fronts on a daily basis. This is a message to every Islamic movement that wishes to reawaken its people and its nation.65

The subversive nature of Islamism also contributes to the persistent defence of the jihadi ideology. By default, every opposition seeks to present alternatives to the reigning leadership because without presenting an alternative it will lose its claim to take power. This statement applies to opposition movements in general, but specifically to revolutionary movements. The Islamist ideology does not call for the replacement of one ruler with another, but for a regime change and a complete transformation in all walks of life. Since the 1920s Islamist movements have depicted the regimes in Arab countries – whether conservativedynastic or progressive-nationalist – as establishments that have strayed from the path of Allah and brought the Arab nation to its lowest point in history. The alternative they offer is a total transformation that will convert an abated culture into an ideal one. After Israel’s neighbouring countries and the Palestinian national movement formally (at least) chose to abandon the policy of the annihilation of Israel and opted for a diplomatic solution, the Islamist movements, as a revolutionary opposition, had to attack this shift. They were faced with two methods of operation: argue that efforts to promote the diplomatic solution have not sufficed, or alternatively, argue against the choice of a diplomatic solution itself. The former, contesting the policy from the liberal side, would have presented a far-reaching deviation from the Islamist worldview and was thus never an option. ‘Circling the wagons’ around the issue of opposing the existence of Israel was therefore required, so as to

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achieve the Islamists’ ambition of being identified as the representatives of an alternative political order. Due to the dubious nature of public opinion polls conducted in undemocratic countries, it is difficult to assess to what degree the Islamist position, with its multiple factions, strikes a chord in the hearts of the masses. Moreover, minor changes in the wording of questions regarding the recognition of Israel, the legitimacy of its existence and willingness to forsake the armed struggle against it might alter the results considerably. However, one fact arose from the analysis of surveys conducted since the late 1970s in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories: even during productive periods in the diplomatic process, a significant number of interviewees identified with the Islamist position that wholeheartedly rejects reaching a permanent compromise with Israel or recognizing its right to exist. Thus, for example, in a survey conducted in Egypt in 1978, more than two-thirds of those interviewed supported a process based on the ‘land for peace’ formula, while a sixth supported the elimination of Israel using military means. A comparative survey conducted on the eve of the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai in 1982 showed that Israelis are more willing, by a significant margin, to have warm and friendly relations with Egypt than are Egyptians with Israelis.66 In a study conducted among the Palestinian public following the Cairo agreement in 1994, just under two-thirds of the people surveyed showed support for the agreement, while 27 per cent opposed it.67 At times when the diplomatic process deteriorated, identification with the Islamist position was sweeping and more significant. Thus, for instance, in a Palestinian poll conducted in the West Bank and Gaza immediately after the massacre by Baruch Goldstein at the Cave of the Patriarchs, in which twenty-nine Palestinians were murdered, 40 per cent demonstrated an unequivocal rejection of negotiations with Israel and only one fifth showed explicit support.68 In a cross-Arab survey conducted in February and March of 1999, in the twilight of Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government when the diplomatic process had reached a dead end, 68 per cent in Syria, 69 per cent in Lebanon, 70 per cent in Jordan and 68 per cent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza answered that they did not want peace with Israel; less than a third in each country answered that they did want peace. The survey discovered a correlation between high levels of religiosity and opposition to peace.69 In a panArab survey on the Arab Peace Initiative published in April 2007, 67 per cent of Moroccans, 54 per cent of Kuwaitis, 74 per cent of Palestinians, 76 per cent of Jordanians and 74 per cent of Algerians responded that the Arab world should not acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state in the Middle East, even if the Palestinians recognized it as such.70

44

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The persistent demand of Islamists for the annihilation of Israel is therefore not completely detached from the pragmatic aspect of this ideology, and has been encouraged by the relative successes of Islamist movements in the struggle against Israel, as compared to the failures of their adversaries, and the dividends gained in public opinion for those opposing the ‘land for peace’ formula. Accompanying these views, which are within the historical reality, are meta-historical perceptions that support the demand to conquer every inch of Palestine. These perceptions evaluate Zionism through the distorted lenses of conspiracy theories and racist beliefs, and transform Israel’s regional clout and the threat it poses to the Islamist vision into deceptively ominous ­proportions that do not permit the acceptance of its existence. One meta-historical perception of Israel adopted by Islamists relates to the ‘cultural attack’ (or the ‘ideological attack’). In the Introduction we discussed the centrality of this narrative in Islamist thought throughout the ages: in supplying a justification for the material inferiority of Muslim societies as compared to the West; in explaining why Islamists were unsuccessful in capturing power throughout the twentieth century; and in justifying to the mainstream faction of Islamism their focus on education and welfare enterprises. Israel and Zionism entered the core of the writing on the ‘cultural attack’ in the late 1970s, at a time when the narrative was canonized and integrated into academia and Islamic research centres, for two main reasons: firstly, due to the need to explain the survival and strengthening of the ‘Zionist entity’, and secondly, due to the grave fear of Islamist thinkers, especially but not exclusively in Egypt, that Israel would deepen its direct cultural influence on Arab societies under the guise of the peace agreement with Egypt. From an Islamist perspective, that influence poses the most severe threat to the future of Islam, as it manipulates the consciousness of the believers and trains them to willingly surrender to infidel perceptions and rule. Islamists who have associated Israel with the notion of the ‘cultural attack’ have described it as an extension of the West, standing at the fore of the Christian world’s conspiracy to destroy the religious identity of Muslims through non-military means. Israel plays a dual role in the ‘cultural attack’. On the one hand, it embodies ideology, culture and society whose goal is to pollute the Islamist identity and bring about its demise; on the other hand, it serves as a Western military stronghold in the heart of the Islamic world. That stronghold’s mere existence testifies to the success of the Western conspiracy against the Muslims. In the eyes of Islamist thinkers in Egypt and elsewhere (but not in their eyes exclusively), the relations of tourism, culture, commerce and science that were established by the Camp David Accords – whether

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the founding of an Israeli academic centre in Cairo, the shooting of an Israeli movie on Egyptian soil or economic exchange – are all part of a master plan to decimate the Egyptian identity from within.71 Hilmi Muhammad al-Qaud (b. 1946), an author, literary critic and professor associated with the Muslim Brothers, clarified that the cultural attack which Israel conducts under the guise of normalization is just as dangerous as a military attack. It is designed to fulfil the Israeli strategic objective of ‘abolishing the Muslim Egyptian identity’, and in the mid and long term to ‘defeat Muslim Egypt without weapons, to conquer its conscience without bullets, and to take over its mind without a fight’.72 When the first Israeli ambassador, Eliyahu Ben-Elissar, arrived in Cairo, al-Qaud sent him an official ‘welcome letter’ in which he explained why any manifestation of cultural normalcy with Israel must be rejected: If your master Begin insisted on sending you – and you specifically – then allow me to emphasize to you that you are a forced guest. The hatred is not directed toward your personality alone, but toward your actions and activities. You may think that you have come to lay strong and robust foundations to what is termed as normalization and the strengthening of political, economical, military, cultural, agricultural and industrial cooperation. Believe me [Ben-Elissar], you will not succeed […] you are in charge of normalizing the cultural relationship. Excuse me, you strive to make two civilizations or cultured societies meet. Long live the lie. Who told you that you are civilized or cultured? All you represent is terror, destruction and ruin. Will they force us to read the works of Shmuel [Yosef] Agnon [an Israeli Nobel Prize laureate], Yael Dayan [daughter of Moshe Dayan] and Hayim [Nahman] Bialik [the Zionist national poet]?! Absolutely not […] our civilization will not meet with yours, much like destruction and building, tolerance and crime, war and peace, and life and death can never meet. You wonder why I am a zealot? I am fanatic about the land I was born in, the motherland I have lived in and the religion I believe in, while you are fanatic about murder, upholding theft and supporting robbery, control, and terror! You say you wish to turn over a new leaf based on peace, harmony and love? I shall respond as follows: yes, we do too, but do you really believe a sheep and a wolf can live together?!73

With regard to the Palestinians, Islamist writing on the ‘cultural attack’ describes a Zionist crusade the goal of which is to undermine the religious identity of the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Islamist thinkers have claimed that Israel makes the Palestinians recite verses from the Torah rather than the Quran, imposes on them Zionist textbooks,74 distributes fake Qurans and adopts as its own Arab and Palestinian traditions, in order

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to strengthen the unity of the different multitudes of immigrants that comprise Israeli society.75 The Hamas Charter describes the purging of textbooks from this attack as a prerequisite for instilling the spirit of Islam within the nation, which in turn is a prerequisite for the jihad against Israel.76 This notion has also been used by Hamas to emphasize the danger that Israel poses to Muslim identity in general. In that vein, an announcement published by the movement in 1988 claimed that ‘the Jewish presence on Islamic Palestinian soil does not threaten only Palestine or the Palestinian people, but the entire Arab Muslim nation, with its religion, faith and civilization’ because ‘this presence knows no boundaries and it will continue with its incessant attempts to attack the Muslim nation, decimate the fibres of its being and build its own culture on the ruins of Islamic culture’.77 Islamist literature dealing with the ‘cultural attack’ describes an intricate and tangled web of means and methods through which the Zionists promote the campaign against Muslims as a whole. Zionists control the world media in order to spread anarchy among their enemies; control banks in order to steer industrial and financial activities in a way that would serve their interests; and manipulate international politics in order to ensure that world leaders support their cause.78 Belief in Zionist involvement in the ‘cultural attack’ has made the normalization of relations between Israel and Arab countries a source of anxiety for Islamists. Due to the Islamists’ belief that any Israeli interaction with Muslim societies is guided by a master plan to eradicate Islamic identity, in their eyes peaceful relations with Israel are tantamount to treason and to forsaking the efforts to resurrect Islam. Al-Qaradawi reiterated that normalization should be rejected in all aspects of life, including political, economic, social and cultural, and that the Israeli invasion of the Arab and Islamic consciousness should be opposed in every way possible. A Muslim should avoid visiting Israel under any circumstance, even to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque.79 Fathi al-Shqaqi defined normalization as an Israeli attempt ‘to penetrate the region and conquer it economically, militarily, politically and culturally’.80 He described the vision of regional economic cooperation as it was suggested in Shimon Peres’ book The New Middle East as part of the Israeli attempt to undermine our ‘Arab and Islamic identity, abolish our history, abolish our faith, and abolish our entire former heritage, and reshape them’.81 It is in the nature of conspiracy theories that one cannot repudiate them. When a conspiracy narrative takes hold of a public, it assumes a life of its own, as has been the case with the ‘cultural attack’. It has transposed Israel in Islamist eyes to the forefront of the Western

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super-conspiracy to eliminate Islam. Once it was cast in that role, the total rejection of Israel’s existence was revalidated. Another meta-historical perception that has permeated Islamist thought since the creation of the State of Israel is anti-Semitism. Islamism, in both its mainstream and marginal factions, has adopted the two hypotheses at the centre of modern-day anti-Semitism. One views the Jew as having an array of negative and destructive genetic attributes that are independent of historical circumstances and are irreparable. The second refers to ‘international Jewry’ as a malicious and well-organized body that initiates and carries out noxious incidents in world history. Alongside these anti-Semitic assumptions, Islamists have also adopted an approach that denies the Holocaust, or at the very least downplays its scope, similarly to radical right-wing European movements and others. They blame the Jews for the outbreak of the Second World War, therefore rendering them responsible for their own persecution, claim that the Zionist movement collaborated with Nazism and argue that the Holocaust is Zionist propaganda, with the numbers of those murdered significantly lower than the ­historiographically accepted estimates. Anti-Semitic notions serve Islamist ideology in five different capacities, which has made their acceptance quick and relatively uncontested. Firstly, demonization of the enemy facilitates gathering support in the fight against it. Secondly, anti-Semitism crystallizes the religious aspect of the Israeli–Arab conflict; it is no longer a conflict between a Jewish state and Muslim states but a historical conflict between the Jews and the Muslims. Thirdly, the demonization of the Jew (and of the Israeli Jew) mitigates the feeling of humiliation caused by Arab defeats suffered at the hands of Israel; Arabs were defeated not by humans but by the spawn of the Devil who reappear throughout history to cause malice, even though their punishment is inevitable. Fourthly, the assumption of a global, sophisticated Jewish conspiracy offers solace to Arabs who lost the battle despite their enemy’s considerable demographic inferiority. Anti-Semitism in its conspiracy form helps to resolve the cognitive dissonance between some Arabs’ beliefs about the reality of the conflict as it should be and the reality of the conflict as it actually is. Fifthly, in denying the direst outcome of anti-Semitism or in blaming the Jews for it, Islamists question one of the main sources of international ­legitimization of their Zionist opponent. Anti-Semitic perceptions are not unique to Islamist thought. As demonstrated in the research of Esther Webman, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was translated into Arabic already in the mid-1920s, and since the 1950s anti-Semitic notions have permeated a wide array

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of opposing worldviews in Arab societies. Jamal Abd al-Nasser, the leader of socialist pan-Arab nationalism, gave a copy of the ‘Protocols’ to an Indian reporter in 1958 to prove to her that Europe is ruled by a network of 300 Zionists; up to 1967, nine translations of the ‘Protocols’ were published in Arabic, and from 1956 to 1967 fifty political books dealing with the booklet were published in Egypt alone.82 Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazin), one of the founders of Fatah who later became Chair of the Palestinian Authority, submitted a doctoral dissertation in Moscow in 1982. Published as a book, it attributed to the Zionist movement a key responsibility in Hitler’s decision to exterminate the Jewish people, while questioning the ‘myth’ of the gas chambers and 6 million murdered Jews.83 There are three common motivations for Arab anti-Semitism: demonization of the enemy, rationalization of its success and undermining its international legitimacy. However, even though viewing the Israeli– Arab conflict through the prism of hatred toward Jews is not unique to Islamists, they have popularized, canonized and integrated anti-Semitic notions into their discourse more than any other Arab ideology has. Anti-Semitic notions were accepted almost without contestation as a historical rationale that is central to founding Islamist documents such as the Hamas Charter, and reappear in the writings of the most prominent Islamist thinkers. The perception of the Jew as inherently possessing inauspicious traits and as a perpetual enemy of Islam ascended in Islamist thought immediately following the 1948 defeat. Following the war, Sayyid Qutb claimed that since its inception the Muslim nation had suffered from the hatred and connivance of the Jews. Grounded in an unfathomable loathing of the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran, Jews have tried to instill doubt about their religion in Muslims’ hearts in order to defeat them. The hatred of the Jews was behind the Crusades and the rise of atheist communism. The Jewish war with Muslims is the longest of all the wars imposed on Islam, and the Jews will not rest until they have destroyed the true religion. According to Qutb, this war became more focused and brutal with the establishment of the State of Israel, yet Allah has always punished the Jews for their corruption and He will punish them once more: as He did in sending the Arabs to force the Jews out of the Arabian Peninsula, and as He did in sending Hitler to subjugate them, so will He punish the Jews for displacing the Arabs from their land in the establishment of ‘Israel’.84 Later Islamist writings explained that the Quran, on the one hand, and the Jewish scriptures, on the other, prove that an array of negative and destructive qualities is an integral part of Jewish identity and

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that hatred of Muslims is inherent to it. Al-Qaradawi claimed that the Quran describes the Jews as cruel, cowardly, miserly, reneging on contracts and treacherous. The Zionist train of thought and the Jewish psyche, drawing on Talmudic teachings, are infected with treachery, aggression, imperialistic ambitions, extreme parsimony and character flaws. The lack of morality in Jewish behaviour ‘is not temporary but an intrinsic element that runs through the ages, from the olden days, and even with their prophets as proven by their holy scriptures themselves’.85 Al-Maqadma claimed that the Quran testifies that Jews as a whole carry traits like viciousness, deceitfulness, cowardice, greediness, avarice, covetousness, miserliness, bargaining, lack of faith in God and inner polarization.86 He wrote that the hatred the Jews feel toward Muslims will not allow peace to become a reality: ‘The hatred is seminal to Jewish nature and it will not go away even if the peace supporters among us make significant concessions to please the Jews. They will not be satisfied until we have forsaken our religion.’87 The inherent moral corruptness of the Jew is one of the main arguments used by the Egyptian Muslim Brothers in their opposition to the peace treaty with Israel. Between 1977 and 1979, the Brothers’ journal al-Dawa painted the character of the Jewish people as a whole as that of traitors who breach contracts, are incapable of living in peace with other people, are hostile to Islam and Muslims, are masters of deceit, trickery and of achieving their goals in negotiations by deceiving the other party, are planning to take over the region in order to establish a Jewish state from the Nile to the Euphrates river and are believers in the decree to kill non-Jews for religious sacrifice, as well as in that God has made them lords of both the blood and the possessions of all other nations.88 In al-Qaud’s July 1981 book criticizing Sadat’s peace policy, he explained that the refusal to make peace with Israel is derived from ‘the nature of Jewish existence and the Zionist reality’, and from ‘the Jews being selfish, liars, argumentative, and despicable by nature, without a shred of love for humankind that is not Jewish’.89 The a priori characteristics of the Jews – as has been demonstrated time and again throughout history since they worshipped the golden calf, conspired against Jesus and betrayed the Prophet Muhammad – demonstrate that peace with them is not only prohibited from a religious standpoint, but also futile and inapplicable.90 According to the anti-Semitic perception adopted by Islamist thought, the web of conspiracy of the vile and despicable Jews is cast across the entire world. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion serves as common ‘proof’ of the Jewish effort to control the world through chicanery. Abdallah Azzam (1941–89), leader of the Arab mujahidin in the

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guerilla war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and one of the most prolific Islamist writers of the latter quarter of the twentieth century, described the ‘Protocols’ as exposing the Jews for spreading the ideas of Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche in order to sabotage European values and choosing Lenin and Russia as the basis for global communism.91 Al-Qaradawi noted that the ‘Protocols’ teaches that the Jews are the enemies of humanity, as also demonstrated by the massacres carried out by the Jews in Palestine and Lebanon.92 The leader of the Tunisian Islamist movement al-Nahda, Rashid al-Ghannushi, stated that the ‘Protocols’ reveals the Zionists’ ambition to subjugate the world to their direct or indirect rule.93 Muhammad Qutb, Sayyid’s brother, argued that international Jewry was behind the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, due to the Empire’s objection to the formation of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. The Jews chose Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), who was in fact a member of the Dönmeh cult (secret followers of the Messianic Sabbatai Zevi), to execute their plans.94 Muhammad al-Hawari, located in Germany and a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research headed by al-Qaradawi, described a devastating Jewish conspiracy in his essay about the deterioration of family values and morals in Europe. According to al-Hawari, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion states that Jewish interest demands bringing moral ruin anywhere in the world.95 The Hamas Charter has adopted this rhetoric and developed it. It describes the control Jews have gained in world media, states that they are responsible for the French Revolution, the communist revolution and other revolutions designed to serve Jewish interests, and claims that secret Jewish societies, like the Freemasons, Rotary and B’nai B’rith, promote their destructive goals through control over world imperialism. It describes Zionist organizations with ‘vast financial resources’ that conspire to seduce Muslim women away from religion in order to ensure their victory in the battle against Islam.96 Common beliefs within Islamist thought that deny or under-estimate the Holocaust emphasize Zionists’ alleged responsibility for the genocide in Europe and the benefits that Zionism has reaped from spreading ‘myths’ about the Holocaust. For instance, Abdallah Azzam depicted the Jews as responsible for the two world wars for the purpose of solidifying their financial situation and promoting the founding of the State of Israel.97 Author Jawdat al-Sad discussed the influence of Judaism on Nietzschean thought, which, according to his view, led to Nazism, and claimed that Nazi–Jewish collaboration existed in exterminating the Jews.98 The Hamas journal Filastin al-Muslima compared Schindler’s List to another Steven Spielberg film, Jurassic Park. According to the journal, Schindler’s List was a ‘new dinosaur’ by the American director

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whose sole purpose was to yet again display a representation of the Holocaust that exists in the Western imagination.99 The Islamist anti-Semitic position is not monolithic. Alongside antiSemitic expressions that have tainted the conflict with a distinct racialreligious tone, Islamist leaders have voiced opposing perceptions, sometimes in contradiction to their own writing. For instance, al-Qaradawi answered negatively to the question of whether he was hostile to the Jews for being Jewish and explained that the religion of the Israelis was not the reason for the campaign against them. He emphasized the Jews’ position as ahl al-kitab, i.e., members of a monotheistic faith, argued that there exists greater affinity on some issues between Judaism and Islam than between Islam and Christianity, and noted the Semitic racial identity shared by Arabs and the sons of Israel.100 The assimilation of anti-Semitic perceptions into the heart of the Islamist worldview has a crucial impact on the conclusiveness of this view with regard to the obligation to terminate the Zionist enterprise. Viewing the Jews as enemies of humanity and Islam and as sub-humans, on the one hand, and as the clever architects of a super-conspiracy, on the other, makes it difficult to develop a rational approach toward Israel, or to empathize with, or at least understand, the fears and hopes of the enemy. Without such sentiment, a paradigmatic shift is difficult and perhaps impossible.

Pragmatic aspects of the Islamist policy Islamists’ unique historical experience in the struggle against Israel, their place as a revolutionary opposition and the meta-historical interpretation they have developed regarding ‘international Jewry’ and Zionism all explain why Muslim Brothers and affiliated factions have firmly maintained the essential position articulated by al-Banna. They persist in demanding the utter annihilation of the Zionist enterprise, even in an age when such annihilation is impractical both militarily and politically. Islamist ideology perceives only one vision as legitimate, and in this vision Israel does not exist. Nevertheless, between the political thought and the political act there is often a gap that reflects the constraints of reality and necessitates accommodating policies to those constraints. The language of articles and speeches which guarantee the proximity of the decimation of Israel is clear cut, while the formulation of an effective tactic to fulfil this goal is more ambiguous. A skill characterizing Islamist thought is the formation of pragmatic policies that do not challenge ideological and religio-legal foundations;

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this skill also manifests in Islamism’s struggle with Israel. Since the inception of diplomatic processes between Israel and its neighbouring states and the Palestinians, Islamist movements have employed diverse tactics that temporarily accept the existence of the ‘Zionist entity’ within a clear ideological framework whose limits do not breach the fundamental and absolute rejection of Israel. Both the mainstream of the Muslim Brothers and its Qutbist offspring have been willing to implement these tactics, which allow them to act in accordance with the limitations of their armed capabilities and immediate political interests, while not neglecting the ideological objective of terminating Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. The three main tactics are a willingness to introduce a hudna (a truce or temporary ceasefire) with Israel, a willingness to accept peace agreements signed with Israel using technical justifications and adding clauses that allow for future cancellation and, finally, prioritization of other conflicts over the struggle with Israel, due to their urgency and necessity. The Treaty of Hudaybiyya, a ten-year truce signed in AD 628 by the Prophet Muhammad and representatives of Mecca, legitimized the concept of hudna. Six years earlier, popular opposition to the Prophet’s message had forced him to immigrate to the city of Medina because he estimated that the forces loyal to him were not strong enough to conquer his home town. He agreed to sign the treaty even though it included humiliating conditions, such as signing it as Muhammad bin Abdallah rather than the messenger of Allah. The truce prevented Mecca from coming to the aid of its ally, the Jewish city of Khaybar, when Muhammad conquered it. Two years later he defeated Mecca itself, thus paving the road to overtaking the entire Arabian Peninsula. Because the Treaty was a crucial turning point in the spreading of Islam, it lends religious approval to political compromises with infidels and usurpers, as long as these are temporary. In contemporary Islamist thought, the hudna signed by the Prophet serves as one justification for the pragmatic view that demands weighing the costs and benefits of every religio-legal decision that is decreed.101 The notion of the hudna is particularly significant to Palestinian Islamists because it provides leeway for manoeuvring pragmatically, while not compromising the absolute ideological repudiation of Israel’s existence. Based on the principle of hudna, Palestinian Islamists have claimed a willingness to acknowledge an Israeli state within the 1967 borders, so long as the borders are declared temporary. As a result, they have been able to present to their supporters a realistic and attainable political horizon for the conflict with Israel, without even slightly relinquishing their core demand for the annihilation of the Zionist enterprise

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through jihad. The hudna has also permitted Palestinian Islamists to declare a ceasefire in response to inter-Arab and international diplomatic pressure and military defeats, without its being interpreted as surrender. Another benefit of hudna is a crystallization of the differences between Islamists and their more moderate opponents. The readiness to implement a hudna but not peace has highlighted the distinction between the Islamists, who would never agree to recognize Jewish sovereignty over Palestine, and the Palestinian national movement and those Arab states that would recognize it. Hamas officials raised the idea of hudna in the very first days of the movement. In a newspaper interview in 1988, Ahmad Yasin declared that the difference between his movement and the PLO exists on two levels: firstly, Hamas strives to establish an Islamic state, while the PLO aspires to establish a secular state; and secondly, the PLO is willing to sign a peace agreement with Israel, while Hamas perceives peace as capitulating Palestinian rights over all of Palestine. Therefore, Hamas is prepared to sign only temporary ceasefire agreements of ten years and with specific conditions. A year later Yasin declared that he demanded the establishment of an Islamic Palestinian state over all of Palestine, where Arabs, Jews and Christians would live under Islamic law. Nevertheless, he would agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state on any liberated part of Palestine as long as the Palestinians would not abandon their claim to the rest of the land.102 During periods when popular Palestinian support for a diplomatic solution was relatively enthusiastic or when Hamas sought to alleviate tension with the PLO, the willingness to temporarily relinquish the path of jihad and come to terms with the existence of Israel has repeatedly arisen in Palestinian Islamist thought. For example, in November 1993, at the height of support for the Declaration of Principles, Hamas official Muhammad Nazzal (b. 1953) declared that his movement supported ‘any intermediate solution, without recognizing the Israeli enemy, its existence or its being. That means that we do not oppose an Israeli withdrawal from any part of Palestine under the condition that it does not involve our recognition of Israel.’103 In February 1995, when suicide bombings initiated by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad threatened to derail the diplomatic process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of Yasir Arafat, the tension between the PLO and Hamas reached its pinnacle. Musa Abu-Marzuq (b. 1951), head of the movement’s political bureau, declared that while liberating Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’ was Hamas’ strategic goal, liberating the West Bank and Gaza Strip was an important link in the chain, and was even considered a strategic goal in the proximate mid-term range.104 In 2002, on the

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eve of the Arab Summit in Beirut, during which adoption of the Saudi initiative was discussed, Ahmad Yasin clarified that the limit of Hamas’ concessions was a hudna that did not recognize Israel nor its legitimacy over parts of Palestine, in return for full Israeli withdrawal from the territories and the establishment of full Palestinian sovereignty over them. He emphasized the difference between hudna and the idea of normalization that lay at the basis of the initiative.105 On 26 June 2003, after a heightened period of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, a hudna was declared, following pressure from Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazin, which resulted in a sharp decline in the number of attacks, even though it collapsed two months later. The SecretaryGeneral of Islamic Jihad, Ramadan Shalah, justified the hudna by invoking the internal harmony card; he explained that his movement still uphheld resistance to the occupation as a strategy, and that its agreement to the temporary ceasefire constituted a ‘tactical move’ designed to preserve the unity of the Palestinian people and to foil Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plot to incite a war between brothers.106 In 2007 the prime minister of the Hamas government in Gaza, Ismail Haniyya, explained his objection to the Arab Peace Initiative through the discrepancies between hudna and peace; in return for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders whose capital is Jerusalem and a return of refugees, Hamas is prepared to initiate a hudna with Israel, but is not willing to acknowledge it, as suggested by the declaration.107 In the dichotomy created between ‘hudna’ and ‘peace’, Hamas leaders warned that they would never accept the ‘land for peace’ formula, but in actuality created an infrastructure for limited recognition of the legitimacy of a Palestinian state that would be established according to the Arab Initiative, if it indeed materialized. A proposal for a long-term ceasefire is the boundary of Hamas’ flexibility in relation to Israel, one not even traversed in unofficial negotiations.108 Wasati Islamists have endorsed Palestinian Islamists’ legitimization of hudna. Al-Qaradawi, for instance, declared that it is permissible to approve a short- or long-term hudna with Israel, during which time the sides will cease all hostility and there will even be relations between them; however, it is not legitimate to implement a peace agreement based on the ‘land for peace’ formula because Palestine belongs to the Muslims and they should not negotiate with the enemy over it.109 Muhammad Salim al-Awa (b. 1942), an Islamist author close to Al-Qaradawi, expressed support for the 2003 Hamas and Islamic Jihad proclamation, agreeing to a three months’ hudna in exchange for a cessation of Israeli hostility against Palestinians, a release of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons and a halt to the destruction of Islamic

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and Christian sacred places. In explaining his position he reasoned that a hudna under these terms did not represent weakness or surrender of the basic principle of Palestinian resistance: liberation of all of the land from all forms of occupation.110 In 1992, Muhammad Imara clarified that the determination of whether Islamists are allowed to strike peace (sulh) with Israel depends on the definition of the word sulh. If it means permanent peace, then it is forbidden, as it legitimizes the stealing of land, the uprooting from homes and the denial of religion. However, if it means a hudna, deriving from an analysis of power differentials and political and military demands both at home and abroad, then it is permitted in so far as Muslims agree to it unanimously or by a majority vote and a quick and serious effort ensues to rectify the circumstances that necessitated the signing of the agreement. Imara emphasized that the Treaty of Hudaybiyya signed by the Prophet Muhammad with the heathens in Mecca was in fact a temporary ceasefire, after which Muslims spread Islam until the day of victory arrived.111 Another pragmatic tactic endorsed by Islamists is willingness to formally accept agreements signed with Israel, albeit under restricting conditions that prepare the ground for denouncing them in the future. This position is especially vital for the Egyptian Muslim Brothers. Since the signing of the Egypt–Israel peace agreement, it was clear to the movement’s leadership that even if it succeeded in deposing the Egyptian regime, it would not be able immediately to revoke the agreement because of Egyptian dependency on American economic support, the need to focus on domestic issues and the Egyptian army’s lack of capacity to win a war against Israel. The Brothers’ solution has been to enjoy the best of both worlds: on the one hand, adhering to the rejection of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, and on the other hand, declaring that they are prepared to uphold the peace agreement if it is amended, ratified by the people or respected by the other side. The Egyptian Muslim Brothers’ draft platform for the founding of their political party, published in August 2007, was the most elaborate political document issued until that time and defined Israel as the ‘Zionist entity’. According to the draft platform, Western powers had implanted Israel ‘in the heart of Palestine’ as a ‘direct security threat to Egyptian national security’; it set the goal of establishing a Palestinian state on all of the land of historic Palestine.112 Nonetheless, the platform refrained from directly referring to the peace agreement, while the indirect reference to it left open the possibility for both its de facto acceptance and its rejection, based on the justification that Israel was not upholding it. Supporting the former possibility, the platform states that ‘upholding the international treaties and agreements ensures stability in

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the relations of the countries and supplies a legal framework to resolve their differences’,113 while maintaining the latter option is embodied in the clause, ‘international law, much like the international treaties and agreements, supplies the means with which to examine the level of commitment of the parties to the treaties, and also allows for their reexamination in the case that one of the parties feels that the treaty discriminates against it and harms its stature or security situation’.114 Isam al-Aryan, at the time head of the movement’s Political Bureau, delivered a similarly ambiguous message. On the one hand, he declared that ‘if the Muslim Brothers come to power it will acknowledge Israel and uphold all agreements signed with it’, and explained that ‘it is unacceptable that every new party that comes to power will renege on agreements signed by previous governments’. On the other hand, he emphasized that the peace agreement would be rectified to correspond with the Brothers’ position, and that the movement – as opposed to the political party it would found – ‘will continue to view Israel as a state whose existence is illegitimate and should not be recognized’.115 This incertitude was maintained also after the revolution that led to the impeachment of Mubarak. After the Muslim Brothers were legalized, in June 2011 the movement founded the Freedom and Justice Party as its political arm. Replicating the draft platform of four years earlier, its platform stated that the party was committed ‘to upholding international treaties and agreements calling for cooperation between the peoples for the benefit of humankind’.116 In the same document, a reservation was included that could lead to the cancellation of the peace agreement: The agreements and the treaties between the countries have to be accepted by the people, which cannot happen unless these agreements and treaties are based on justice, serve the interests of both parties [that signed them], and are implemented meticulously and honestly. International law allows the parties to re-examine these agreements and treaties in light of these conditions, a procedure that is recognized in international relations. Therefore, the party perceives a need to re-examine many agreements in various fields that were ratified under the previous regime.117

The speakers of the movement announced that it would respect the peace agreement, as it had become a part of reality, but emphasized that its clauses could be altered through a referendum.118 After the ousting of Mubarak, the General Guide of the movement, Muhammad Badi, determined that peace with Israel does not concur with the decrees of Islam; called for Egypt to prepare for military threats from Israel and to show perseverance and restraint; and clarified that the defence of Islam against conspiracies hatched under the pretence of a ‘false peace’ is justification

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enough to go to war. Simultaneously, he claimed that even if the peace agreement were annulled, ‘it does not necessarily mean a declaration of war’ on Israel.119 Following an incident near the Sinai border in August 2011 in which five Egyptian soldiers were unintentionally killed, most likely by IDF fire, Hasan al-Haywan, an activist of the Muslim Brothers, published an article in which he bridged the gap between the demand to eliminate Israel and the Brothers’ practice of patience and gradualism by calling for the postponement of a military conflict to the distant future: The war with the Zionists will no doubt arrive in the end, as the Zionist entity is an expansionist and racist enterprise that after the [2011] revolution has stumbled into a conflict with the Egyptian people, not only with the Egyptian army and government. However, the Egyptian revolution has yet to be completed. We are without a parliament, without a constitution and without a president. This does not disrupt the necessity and the ability to take a quick and strict stance. However, [the choice is not] between total compliance with the Camp David Accords and its cancellation and entering a war with the Zionist enemy […] What is needed now is an immediate amendment of some of the clauses of Camp David in a way that will enable Egypt to control Sinai, prevent the recurrence of Israeli attacks on its borders, and enforce its full national sovereignty over Sinai. Egypt can negotiate and achieve this now, but at this point it cannot complete the national strategic plan that will include a confrontation with the ­expansionist, racist Israeli enterprise.120

Another pragmatic tactic is the prioritization of jihad with Israel as secondary. This position was prominent both within the jihadi group fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and within the Qutbist jihadi movements. It preserves the total commitment toward the liberation of Palestinian land from the rule of the Zionists by means of using a violent struggle, but it prioritizes more urgent struggles, either because they are more likely to succeed at a certain point in time, or because carrying them out first is a prerequisite to the successful conclusion of the struggle against the Zionists. Abdallah Azzam was born in Silat al-Harithiyya, a village northwest of Jenin, and his biography and the jihadist ideology he adopted are intimately connected with the Palestinian cause. Yet he chose to operate in a different arena because of the sober acknowledgement of his limited ability to influence the situation in his homeland. In 1973 he completed his degree in religious law at al-Azhar University and began lecturing at Amman University, until he was fired, most likely due to his ties with the Muslim Brothers. From Amman he moved to Saudi Arabia to teach at the King Abd al-Aziz University in Jeddah. Following the

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Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, he travelled to the Pakistani– Afghani border and established training camps that attracted thousands of young Muslims, hundreds of whom were Saudis, later known as the ‘Arab Afghans’. These warriors, among them Usama Bin-Ladin, became the nucleus of al-Qaida. The Saudi regime supported Azzam’s activities in Afghanistan, as they contributed to the portrayal of Saudi Arabia as an active partner in the pan-Islamic struggle and drove away from the kingdom adventurous, overly radical youth.121 In a seminal book published during the mid-1980s, at the height of the war in Afghanistan, Azzam summarized his teachings on jihad and legitimized deferring the struggle against the Zionists. He claimed that every Muslim has a personal obligation (fard ayn), akin to the obligation to fast or pray, to fight against the infidels who invade a part of the lands of Islam.122 This obligation is directed first and foremost toward every Muslim living in the territory that has been invaded and toward those residing in the adjacent territories. If those Muslims are not able to withstand the attack, each and every Muslim must join them to defend the Muslim land.123 Throughout the years, infidels have conquered many Muslim lands, and fighting to free them all simultaneously is impractical. Hence, the process should be prioritized. According to Azzam, among the occupied lands, the wars to liberate Afghanistan and Palestine are the most urgent, as those two constitute bases for infidels’ expansion plans against Muslims; of the two, he argued, defending Afghanistan should be the ultimate priority, as the fighting there was at its zenith and the resistance movement operating there was untarnished by non-Islamic elements.124 Prioritization of the struggle against Zionism as secondary by Qutbist jihadist factions is related to their point of departure, which divides humanity into Islamic regimes that uphold the rules of Allah to the letter and jahili regimes that do not. Qutbists draw no distinction between the infidelity of a secular Muslim-Arab regime and that of the Zionist regime, so the war against the one is not holier than the war against the other. Therefore, they conclude that the war against the more proximate enemy, the secular Arab regime, should be prioritized over a war against the Jewish occupier for two reasons: firstly, the increased likelihood of defeating the closer enemy, and secondly, the potential empowerment of heretic regimes if the eradication of Zionism is credited to them. Shukri Mustafa (1942–78) founded Takfir wal-Hijra, a jihadi movement that chose to emphasize the Qutbist teachings of seclusion from society and formation of the Islamic vanguard. He embodied these perceptions in the most extreme manner by determining that there is no difference between the Israeli army and the Egyptian army, and therefore, ‘if the Jews or

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anyone else came [to fight against Egypt], our movement should not fight alongside the Egyptian army, rather run away to safety’.125 Abd al-Salam Faraj, the main ideologist of the Egyptian Jihad Group that planned and executed the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar alSadat on 6 October 1981, saw the Egyptian president as a non-Muslim ruler. In a book he wrote in 1981, al-Jihad: al-Farida al-Ghayiba (Jihad: The Neglected Duty), Faraj granted the religious authorization for the murder that took place several months later. He determined that jihad against ‘the rulers that have expropriated the leadership of the Muslims’ is a personal obligation of every Muslim and that imposing the rule of Islam over Muslim countries precedes the liberation of Palestine: Some believe that the main arena for jihad today is the liberation of Jerusalem, it being a sacred land. Indeed, the liberation of sacred lands is a religious decree that befalls every Muslim. Nonetheless, the messenger of Allah, may God bless him and grant him peace, characterized the believer as smart and wise, who knows what will work and can bring change, and offers firm and deep-seated solutions. This point necessitates the following clarifications. Firstly, fighting the proximate enemy takes precedence over the distant enemy. Secondly, Muslim blood will be shed [by heretic rulers] even if the victory [over Israel] is secured. The question that needs to be asked now is whether the victory [over Israel, at this time] will serve the Islamic state [that is still] in its formative phase, or will it [in fact] serve the heretic regime and reinforce the foundations of a state that deviates from the law of Allah? The [heretic] rulers will exploit Muslims’ nationalistic ideas to achieve non-Islamic goals, even if pretending to be Islamic on the surface. Therefore, there is no doubt that it is imperative for the war [against Israel] to be conducted under a Muslim flag and Muslim leadership. Thirdly, the base for the colonialist rule in Islamic countries is the [heretic] rulers. [Therefore,] prioritizing the elimination of colonialism before [the elimination of the rulers], is futile and a waste of time. We should focus then on our Islamic issue, which is upholding Allah’s laws in our countries first and foremost.126

Conclusion The Islamist vision for the future of Israel does not acknowledge shades of grey and the middle ground. Rather, it demands an Islamic conquest of every grain of sand under Jewish sovereignty. Islamists have based their claim to Palestine on their belief that it is a waqf land that was robbed from its inhabitants through a Zionist-imperialist conspiracy. Thus, they wholeheartedly reject the Zionist enterprise. This stance has remained firm and undisputed since the 1920s. It is supported by the lack of a formative experience of defeat against Israel, the relative

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success of Islamist movements in their armed struggle against Zionism, the oppositional-revolutionary nature of Islamist movements and the meta-historical interpretation that has taken root in their thought, according to which Zionism spearheads the ‘cultural attack’ of the West against the Muslim world, the Jews are inherently despicable and international Jewry controls the world and is determined to eradicate Islam. Despite this unequivocal perception, all Islamist factions accept as legitimate those intermediate solutions that allow for the postponement of the armed struggle against Israel through signing a hudna with it, conditionally accepting previously signed peace treaties and deferring the struggle against it to a later date. However, these solutions are merely tactical and incorporate the stipulation that the elimination of Israel is the ultimate goal that will eventually be achieved.

Notes 1 A. A. M. el-Awaisi, The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1998), pp. 28–33. 2 M. A. Q. Abu-Faris, al-Fiqh al-Siyasi Inda al-Imam Hasan al-Banna (Amman: Dar al-Bashir lil-Thaqafa wal-Ulum, 1999), pp. 102–3; El-Awaisi, The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question, pp. 34–89. 3 H. al-Banna, ‘Risalat al-mutamar al-khamis’, in Majmuat Rasail al-Imam alBanna (Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi wal-Nashr al-Islamiyya, 2006), pp. 372–4. 4 H. al-Banna, Mudhakkirat al-Dawa wal-Daiya (n.p, n.d.), pp. 287–8. 5 Abu-Faris, al-Fiqh al-Siyasi Inda al-Imam Hasan al-Banna, pp. 108–9. 6 A. Sad al-Din, Mudhakkirat wa-Dhikrayat: Ma Qabla al-Tasis wa-Hatta Am 1954 (Cairo: Madbuli, 2010), pp. 238–40, 244, 258–60; S. Bar, The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan (Tel-Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center, 1998), pp. 16–17. 7 H. al-banna, ‘Risalat al-jihad’, in Majmuat Rasail al-Imam al-Banna (Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi wal-Nashr al-Islamiyya, 2006), pp. 603–28. 8 Sad al-Din, pp. 238–40, 248–54, 262–3; R. Shaked and A. Shabi, Hamas – Palestinian Fundamentalist Movement (Jerusalem: Keter, 1993, in Hebrew), pp. 42–3; Bar, The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan pp. 11–13. 9 Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, ‘Bayan al-haya al-tasisiyya lil-Ikhwan al-Muslimin an ahdath Filastin sanat 1948’: www.ikhwan.net/wiki (accessed June 2012). 10 Sad al-Din, Mudhakkirat wa-Dhikrayat, pp. 238–40, 244, 258–60; Bar, The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, pp. 16–17. 11 R. P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 57–8. El-Awaisi relates some military accomplishments to the Brotherhood, yet he also recognizes that their weight in the war’s comprehensive results was limited: El-Awaisi, The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question, pp. 200–10.

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12 K. I. al-Sharif, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin fi Harb Filastin (Cairo: Maktabat alWahba, n.d.); Abu Faris, al-Fiqh al-Siyasi Inda al-Imam Hasan al-Banna, pp. 110–11. 13 M. Qutb, Waqiuna al-Muasir (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 4rth edition, 2006 [1997]), pp. 334–5, 366–72. 14 Abu Faris, al-Fiqh al-Siyasi Inda al-Imam Hasan al-Banna, pp. 112–15. 15 Sad al-Din, pp. 245–7, 255–7; on the Muslim Brothers’ relations with the Syrian state see: E. Zisser, ‘The Muslim Brothers in Syria: Between coexistence and struggle’, in M. Litvak (ed.), Islam and Democracy in the Arab World (TelAviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1997, in Hebrew), pp. 96–122. 16 Bar, The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, pp. 20–1; G. H. Talhami, Palestine and Egyptian National Identity (New York, London: Praeger, 1992), pp. 133–4. 17 M. J. Kishk, al-Ghazw al-Fikri (Kuwait: Maktabat al-Aml, third edition, 1967), pp. 2–4. 18 Y. al-Qaradawi, Dars al-Nakba al-Thaniyya: Limadha Inhazamna … waKayfa Nantasiru (second edition, 1969, n.p.), pp. 22–40, 65–6. 19 A. Sela, The Decline of the Israeli–Arab Conflict (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 98–108. 20 Y. Reiter, War, Peace and International Relations in Contemporary Islam: Muslim Scholars on Peace-Treaty with Israel (Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 2008, in Hebrew), pp. 85–107. 21 A. A. Ramadan, Jamaat al-Takfir fi Misr: al-Usul al-Tarikhiyya wal-Fikriyya (Cairo: al-Haya al-Misriyya al-Amma lil-Kitab, 1995), pp. 211–12; H. M. al-Qaud, al-Sulh al-Aswad: Ruya Islamiyya li-Mubadarat al-Sadat walTariq ila Filastin (Cairo: Dar al-Itisam, 1988), p. 133; M. Muru, al-Haraka al-Islamiyya fi Misr (Cairo: Al-Dar al-Misriyya lil-Nashr, 1994), pp. 149, 154–6. 22 Al-Qaud, al-Sulh al-Aswad, pp. 67, 88. 23 Ibid., pp. 55–6, 156. 24 Ibid., p. 98. 25 Al-Qura-n, trans. A. Ali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 26; A. A. Ali, ‘al-Daiya al-Islami al-Shaykh Wajdi Ghunaym: Lan Yuida al-Quds ila al-Jihad’, al-Haqiqa, 177 (26.10.1991), p. 7. 26 M. al-Azazi, ‘al-Shaykh al-Ghazali bi-Jamaat al-Qahira: Hudur al-Mutamar Fursa li-Iadat Bina Anfusina wal-Wuquf ala Ard Sulba’, al-Haqiqa, 178 (2.11.1991), p. 7. 27 M. Mashhur, ‘Ghaza wa-Ariha wal-Suq al-Sharq Awsatiyya’, al-Dawa (7.10.1993), pp. 2–3. 28 M. Abu-al-Nasr, ‘Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun wa-Qadiyyat Filastin’, al-Dawa (7.10.1993), p. 4. 29 Y. Abu-Hilala, ‘Rudud Afal Ghadiba wa-Taharrukat li-Ihtiwa Athar Ittifaq al-Qahira’, al-Dawa (19.5.1994), p. 14. 30 ‘Bayan Sadir an al-Maktab al-Ilami li-Jamaat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin fi ­al-Urdun’, al-Dawa (19.5.1994), p. 51.

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31 ‘Bayan min al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin fi Suriya bi-Munasabat Tawqi Ittifaq alQahira’, al-Dawa (19.5.1994), p. 50. 32 ‘Bayan min al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin hawla Tawqi wa-Tanfidh Ittifaqiyyat Ghaza-Ariha’, al-Dawa (19.5.1994), p. 50. 33 ‘Al-Shaykh Yasin: al-Kataib Laysat Ghaiba wa-Hamas Lan Tatarajjaa an Amaliyyatiha wal-Intifada Tastamirru’, al-Sabil (18.3.2002), p. 5. 34 A. al-Majali, ‘Masirat al-Ghadab Didd al-Haqd al-Sahyuni: Masira Hashida Ikhtaraqat Shawari al-Zarqa Tadamunan maa Intifadat al-Aqsa’, al-Sabil (25.3.2002), p. 4. 35 M. Litvak, ‘The Islamist movements and the Arab Peace Initiative’, in E. Lavie (ed.), Israel and the Arab Peace Initiative (Tel-Aviv: The Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, 2010, in Hebrew), p. 127. 36 ‘Al-Urubbiyya Tuhawiru al-Murshid al-Sadis li-Jamaat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin bi-Misr’, al-Urubbiyya, 34 (May–June 2003), p. 32. 37 L. Azuri, ‘Public debate on the political platform of the planned Muslim Brotherhood party in Egypt’ (11.12.2007): www.memry.org (accessed June 2012). 38 Shaked and Shabi, Hamas, pp. 31–2. 39 Ibid., p. 33. 40 ‘Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement – Filastin (Hamas)’, in Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Hamas Wind: Violence and Coexistence (Yediot Aharonot Books, 2006, in Hebrew), pp. 306–13, 318–19, 326. 41 Ibid., pp. 309–11. 42 Shaked and Shabi, Hamas, pp. 185, 187–8, 190, 192–3; M. Hatina, Palestinian Radicalism: The Islamic Jihad Movement (Tel-Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center, 1994, in Hebrew), pp. 35–46; R. Sayyid Ahmad, ‘Rihlat al-damm alladhi hazama al-sayf: Malamih min hayat wa-fikr al-shahid al-duktur Fathi alShqaqi’, in R. Sayyid Ahmad (ed.), Fathi al-Shqaqi: Rihlat al-Damm Alladhi Hazama al-Sayf: al-Amal al-Kamila lil-Shahid al-Duktur Fathi al-Shqaqi (Cairo: Markaz Yafa lil-Dirasat wal-Abhath, 1997), pp. 53, 61–2. For a discussion on the ideological disputes between Hamas and the Islamic Jihad Movement see Hatina, Palestinian Radicalism, pp. 61–9. 43 ‘Harakat al-Jihad al-Islami: al-Tarif’: www.nedayequds.com/arabic/index. php/jehadeslami/2010-08-21-09-56-05.html (accessed June 2012). 44 As quoted in Sayyid Ahmad (ed.), Fathi al-Shqaqi, p. 1326. 45 Shaked and Shabi, Hamas, pp. 110–11. For a review of Hamas’ resistance to the Madrid process see also: A. Nüsse, Muslim Palestine: The Ideology of Hamas (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), pp. 125–40; S.  Mishal and A. Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 119–20. 46 Al-Tahrir, ‘La Budda min Iktimal al-Hazima li-Tabdaa Rihlat al-Khuruj’, Filastin al-Muslima (October 1993), p. 3. 47 ‘Hamas fi Bayanihi al-Dawri Raqm 103: Mashru Ghaza-Ariha Tanan Ghadiran fi al-Zahr’, Filastin al-Muslima (October 1993), p. 28. 48 As quoted in Sayyid Ahmad (ed.), Fathi al-Shqaqi, pp. 697, 864.

Islamism, Zionism and Israel 49 50 51 52

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Ibid., pp. 860–1. Ibid., pp. 967–8. Shaked and Shabi, Hamas, p. 328. ‘Hamas: Ittifaq al-Hukm al-Dhati Mazaqa al-Shab al-Filastini Arbaat Aqsam wa-sa-Nuwasilu al-Tasaddi lil-Mashru al-Sahyuni al-Qadhir fi al-Mintaqa’, al-Dawa (19.5.1994), p. 11. 53 I. al-Maqadma, ‘Nam nusirru ala tahrir kull Filastin’, in al-Markaz al-Filastini lil-Ilam (ed.), Maqalat Diniyya Siyasiyya (Gaza: al-Markaz al-Filastini lil-Ilam, n.d.), page numbers not included. 54 I. al-Maqadma, ‘Mata tawqifu Hamas amaliyyatiha al-istishhadiyya?!’, in alMarkaz al-Filastini lil-Ilam (ed.), Maqalat Diniyya Siyasiyya (Gaza: al-Markaz al-Filastini lil-Ilam, n.d.), not paginated. 55 Al-Tahrir, ‘Filastin wal-Quds Tubau fi Mazadat al-Taswiya wa-Hal Min Waqfa Rasmiyya wa-Shabiyya Sarima?!’, Filastin al-Muslima (July 2000), p. 3. 56 M. Badr al-Din, ‘al-Shaykh Salah Shhada al-Qaid al-Askari al-Awwal liHarakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya Hamas li-Filastin al-Muslima: al-Ihtilal La Yazulu ila bil-Quwwa wa-Abna Hamas Mustaidun lil-Mawt min ajli Watanihim’, Filastin al-Muslima (July 2000), pp. 18–20. 57 MEMRI, ‘2000 Camp David Summit (c) – evaluation of results’ (14.8.2000), in Hebrew: www.memri.org.il/cgi-webaxy/sal/sal.pl?lang=he &act=show&ID=107345_memri&dbid=articles&dataid=209 (accessed June 2012). 58 Litvak, ‘The Islamist movements and the Arab Peace Initiative’, p. 127. 59 S. Eldar, Getting to Know Hamas (Jerusalem: Keter, 2012, in Hebrew), pp. 155–60; for the platform’s text see ibid., pp. 350–64. 60 Ibid., p. 132. 61 H. al-Banna, ‘Risalat mutamar talbat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin’, in Majmuat Rasail al-Imam al-Banna, p. 244. 62 Y. al-Qaradawi, Min Fiqh al-Dawla fi al-Islam (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 3rd edition 2001 [1997]), pp. 151–60. 63 I. Ghawsha, ‘Haqiqat Intisarat al-Sahyuniyya’, Filastin al-Muslima (July 2000), p. 21. 64 ‘Liqa maa al-ustadh Khalid Mashal’ (2.8.2010): www.hamasinfo.net/ar/ default.aspx?xyz (accessed June 2012). 65 H. Abu-Mahfuz, ‘al-Zahhar lil-sabil: Hamas haqqaqat injazat azima wa-fi tariqiha lil-tahrir’ (13.12.2010): www.assabeel.net (accessed June 2012). 66 S. A. Ibrahim, Ittijahat al-Ray al-amm al-Arabi Nahwa Masalat al-Wahda (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wahda al-Arabiyya, 2nd edition 1981 [1980]), p. 317. On the greater willingness of Israelis to establish warm personal relations with Egyptians than vice versa: E. Yuchtman-Yaar and M. Inbar, ‘Social distance in the Israeli–Arab conflict: A resource-dependency analysis’, Comparative Political Studies, 19:3 (October 1986), 283–316. 67 The poll was conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), headed by Prof. Khalil Shqaqi, among 1,244 Palestinian

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respondents in the West Bank and Gaza. See: CPRS, ‘Public opinion poll #1: The Palestinian–Israeli Agreement: “Gaza–Jericho First” September 10–11, 1993’: www.pcpsr.org/survey/cprspolls/94/poll1.html (accessed June 2012). 68 The poll was conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), see: CPRS, ‘Public opinion poll #7: Palestinian Elections and the Hebron Massacre, March 20, 1994’: www.pcpsr.org/survey/cprspolls/94/ poll7.html (accessed June 2012). 69 As quoted at H. Khashan, Arab Attitudes Toward Israel and Peace (Tel-Aviv: The Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, 2001, in Hebrew), p. 40. The poll was based on a sample of 400 respondents in each of the countries and the Palestinian Territories. 70 The poll was conducted by ‘Mashru Miqyas al-Ray al-Amm al-Arabi’ among a sample of 1,431 Jordanians, 1,270 Palestinians, 1,300 Algerians, 1,277 Moroccans and 750 Kuwaitis; see: al-Majalla, 1,416 (4.7.2007), p. 26. 71 R. Yadlin, An Arrogant Oppressive Spirit: Anti-Zionism as Anti-Judaism in Egypt (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1988, in Hebrew), pp. 34–55. 72 Al-Qaud, al-Sulh al-Aswad, pp. 211–13. 73 Ibid., pp. 104–6. 74 H. M. Hassan, Wasail Muqawamat al-Ghazw al-Fikri lil-Alam al-Islami (Mecca: Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami, 1981), pp. 151–4. 75 A. M. Jarisha and M. S. al-Zaybaq, Asalib al-Ghazw al-Fikri lil-Alam alIslami (Cairo: Dar al-Itisam, 1977), p. 175. 76 The Charter of Hamas, section 15. 77 J. al-Hamad and I. al-Baraghuthi (eds), Dirasa fi al-Fikr al-Siyasi li-Harakat alMuqawama al-Islamiyya Hamas (Amman: Markaz Dirasat al-Sharq al-Awsat, 1996), p. 119. 78 Jarisha and al-Zaybaq, Asalib al-Ghazw al-Fikri lil-Alam al-Islami, pp. 163–6. 79 Al-Qaradawi, al-Quds Qadiyyat Kull Muslim (Doha, 1998), www.al-mostafa. info/data/arabic/depot/gap.php?file=000806-www.al-mostafa.com.pdf , p. 65. 80 As quoted in Sayyid Ahmad (ed.), Fathi al-Shqaqi, p. 556. 81 Ibid., pp. 569–70. 82 E. Webman, ‘Adoption of the protocols in the Arab discourse on the Arab– Israeli conflict, Zionism and the Jews’, in E. Webman (ed.), The Global Impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century Old Myth (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 175–95. On the distribution of the ‘Protocols’ in Palestinian society in the 1920s see also: J. Nevo, ‘The Palestine Arabs’ attitude towards the Yishuv and the Zionist Movement’, in S. Almog (ed.), Zionism and the Arabs (Jerusalem: The Historical Society of Israel and the Zalman Shazar Center, 1983), pp. 153. 83 M. Litvak and E. Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (London: Hurst & Company, 2009), pp. 164, 268–9. 84 S. Qutb, Marakatuna maa ... al-Yahud (Cairo and Beirut: Dar al-Shuruq, 10th edition, 1989), pp. 20–37. 85 Al-Qaradawi, al-Quds Qadiyyat Kull Muslim, pp. 36–49, 55.

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86 I. al-Maqadma, Maalim fi al-Tariq ila Tahrir Filastin (n.p.: Muassasat al-Yam, 1994), pp. 20–6. 87 I. al-Maqadma, Ittifaq Ghaza-Ariha: Ruya Islamiyya (n.p.), p. 133. 88 I. Altman, ‘Oppositional Islamic organizations in Egypt’, in A. Ayalon (ed.), Regime and Opposition in Egypt Under Sadat (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1983, in Hebrew), p. 120. 89 Al-Qaud, al-Sulh al-Aswad, pp. 45, 48. 90 Ibid., pp. 22–3. 91 A. Azzam, al-Sartan al-Ahmar (n.d., not paginated): www.azzambooks.4t. com/azzam.htm (accessed June 2012); and see a similar idea in Y. al-Qaradawi’s book, al-Hulul al-Mustawrada wa-Kayfa Janat ala Ummatina (Beirut: Muassasat al-Risala, 1974 [1971]), pp. 57–9. 92 Y. al-Qaradawi, Hajat al-Bashariyya ila al-Risala al-Hadariyya li-Ummatina (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, 2004), pp. 44–9. 93 R. al-Ghannushi, al-Qadiyya al-Filastiniyya ala Muftaraq Tariqayni (n.p., 1983), pp. 51–2. 94 M. Qutb, Waqiuna al-Muasir (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2006 [1997]), pp. 334–5. On ‘Global Zionism’s’ role in overthrowing the Ottoman Empire: Al-Qaradawi, al-Hulul al-Mustawrada, p. 52; Y. Al-Qaradawi, Ummatuna Bayna Qarnayn (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2nd edition 2002 [2000]), pp. 128–30. 95 M. al-Hawari, ‘al-Jins wal-tarbiya al-jinsiyya fi daw al-Sharia al-Islamiyya’, al-Majalla al-ilmiyya lil-Majlis al-Urubbi lil-Ifta wal-Buhuth, 8–9 (June 2006), 70–1. 96 See sections 17 and 22 in Charter of Hamas. 97 Litvak and Webman, From Empathy to Denial, p. 288. 98 Ibid., pp. 222, 268. 99 Ibid., p. 182. 100 Y. al-Qaradawi, Nahnu wal-Gharb: Asila Shaika wa-Ajwiba Hasima (Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi wal-Nashr al-Islamiyya, 2006), pp. 87–100. 101 Al-Qaradawi noted that in signing the agreement the prophet gave preference (despite some opposition to his decision) to the true and substantial interests of the Muslim nation, even though it involved a measure of humiliation: ‘Fiqh al-Muwazanat’, al-Raid, 191 (August 8–10 1997), pp. 26–7. 102 Shaked and Shabi, Hamas, pp. 112–13. 103 Al-Hamad and al-Baraghuthi¸ Dirasa fi al-Fikr al-Siyasi li-Harakat alMuqawama al-Islamiyya Hamas, p. 202. 104 Ibid., p. 64. 105 Litvak, ‘The Islamist movements and the Arab Peace Initiative’, p. 127. 106 B. Chernitsky, ‘Inquiry and analysis series report 144: The domestic Palestinian dispute over the hudna’ (25.7.2003): www.memri.org (accessed June 2012). 107 Litvak, ‘The Islamist movements and the Arab Peace Initiative’, p. 133. 108 Even a seemingly ground-breaking non-paper detailing the terms for an agreement between Hamas and Israel (which according to a journalist who specializes in Hamas was proposed by Khalid Mashal to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Septemer 2008, titled ‘Israel and Hamas – peaceful coexistence’) did

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not offer more than a commitmment to non-violence for 25 years in return for the establishment of a Palestinian State on the 1967 borders and other arrangements. Olmert denied the existence of such a document. See Eldar, Getting to Know Hamas, pp. 237–41. 109 Al-Qaradawi, al-Quds Qadiyyat Kull Muslim, p. 18. 110 M. S. al-Awa, ‘Hudnat al-muqawama’ (n.d.): www.alarabnews.com/alshaab/ GIF/11–07–2003/a13.htm (accessed June 2012). 111 M. S. Tantawi, M. Imara et.al, Fikr al-Muslim al-Muasir: Ma Alladhi Yashghaluhu? (Cairo: Markaz al-Ahram, 1992), p. 86. 112 IslamOnline.net, ‘Barnamaj hizb al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin’ (26.8.2007): www. islamonline.net/arabic/daawa/2007/08/ikhwan.pdf (accessed June 2012). 113 Ibid., p. 71. 114 Ibid., p. 29. 115 Azuri, ‘Public debate on the political platform of the planned Muslim Brotherhood party in Egypt’. 116 IslamOnline.net, Barnamaj hizb al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, p. 8. 117 Ibid., p. 22. 118 H. Ghabun, ‘Harakat al-Ikhwan bi-Misr tahtarimu muahadat al-salam wa-la turidu al-riasa’ (17.3.2011): http://archive.arabic.cnn.com/2011/hiaw/2/17/ Muslim.brotherhood.egypt; Naba Nyuz, ‘Ikhwan Misr: La nafridu rayana bi-shan muahadat al-salam maa Israil’ (18.2.2011): www.nabanews. net/2009/34408.html (accessed June 2012). 119 M. Badi, ‘Faridat al-salam fi al-Islam’ (8.4.2010): www.ikhwanonline.com/ article?ArtId=63089SecID=210 (accessed June 2012). 120 H. al-Haywan, ‘Thawrat Misr wal-Kiyan al-Sahyuni’ (8.9.2011): www. ikhwanonline.com/new/Article.aspx?ArtID=90790&SecID=390 (accessed June 2012). 121 A. B. Atwan, The Secret History of al-Qaida (London: Abacus, 2007), p. 36. 122 A. Azzam, al-Difa an Aradi al-Muslimin Ahamm Furud al-Ayan (Amman: Maktabat al-Risala al-Haditha, 1987), pp. 19–32. 123 Ibid., p. 33. 124 Ibid., pp. 34–8. 125 G. Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), p. 84. 126 A. A. Faraj, al-Jihad: al-Farida al-Ghaiba (n.p., 1981), pp. 15, 18–19.

2 ‘At Basel I founded an ideal for the Muslims’: Zionism and Israel as role models in Islamist writing An ideal for the Muslims

A few months prior to the outbreak of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square that led to the ousting of President Husni Mubarak, Muhammad Mubarak, an Egyptian engineer and junior Muslim Brothers activist, published an article discussing the advantages Israel has over its Arab neighbours. Mubarak wrote that when he was a boy his knowledge of Israel was a mixture of information and emotion that did not sufficiently explain why the Zionists are so powerful and the Arabs are so weak. However, as he grew older and learned more, he realized that the discrepancy in power was not accidental. As a matter of fact, it was the result of vigorous Zionist activity in a multitude of fields and Israel’s usage ‘of all legitimate and illegitimate means’ to achieve its goals, in contrast to a submissive and passive Arab culture that teaches one to talk rather than act, that is filled with empty statements and that does not utilize the talents of the individual. In his article, Mubarak elaborated on the nature of this gap: Arab investment in scientific research and development is half of its Israeli counterpart, even though the overall gross national product of all Arab countries is eleven times that of Israel and their size is 649 times the size of Israel. Saudi Arabia has 171 registered patents, Egypt 77 and Kuwait 52, while Israel has 16,805. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is ranked sixty-fourth among universities around the world, while no Arab university is ranked in the top 500 universities. Nine Israelis have won the Nobel Prize [the article was written before Israeli Professor Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2011 and two American-Israeli professors, Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt, won it in 2013], in comparison to six Arabs. Zionist and pro-Zionist organizations operate in the United States as an effective lobby for Israel, while no such lobby is operating on behalf of Arabs. According to Mubarak, activists in the ‘Islamic realm’ who believe that the cultural, technological and media prowess of Israel can be countered ‘just through citing liturgical poems from the Quran or through meetings where the name

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of Allah is mentioned’, fail to realize that a sober comprehension of reality combined with solid values and effective measures are what build a man.1 Mubarak’s article is not uncommon in Muslim Brothers’ thought and specifically echoes the writings of the two pillars of contemporary Islamist thought, Muhammad al-Ghazali and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Islamist thinkers, and especially the wasati faction, have portrayed the Zionist movement and Israel in dozens of books, articles and sermons as representative of remarkable achievements and qualities that Muslim societies are called upon to study and imitate. As role models, Zionism and Israel personify aspects of the vision Islamists outline for Muslim societies, thus providing the key to their resurrection. They are presented as examples of how the power of faith can rejuvenate a religion and assure it of victory over its enemies; of the importance of merging modernity and tradition; of the importance of long-term strategic planning for the realization of national goals; of sacrificing individual desires for the greater good; of cultivating relationships between the homeland and its diaspora; of scientific, economic, social and military development; and finally, as examples of true democracy where the leaders are subordinated to the will of the voters, not vice versa. At face value, this perception appears to inherently contradict the foundations of Islamist thought. How can the portrayal of Jewish sovereignty as diabolical, despicable, artificial, treacherous, manipulative, heartless and illegitimate coincide with the representation of the Zionist enterprise as a role model? Yet the duality of rejecting the enemy at its very core and accepting it as a role model is not unique to the Islamist approach toward Zionism and Israel. It lies at the root of the modernistapologetic perception from which the Muslim Brothers has drawn, and on which its approach to the West has been formed. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida introduced the modernist-apologetic approach at the end of the nineteenth century as a synthesis between revelation and modernity. Their approach was adopted later by Hasan al-Banna and his successors, particularly in the wasati faction of Islamism. This approach counters the concern that adherence to traditional ways will perpetuate the inferiority of Muslim societies in comparison to the West, as well as the concern that unconditional acceptance of modern rationalist liberalism will sever these societies from their traditions. The modernist-­apologists argue that essential aspects of science, technology and Western structures of government and administration are rooted in Islam both theologically and historically. Theologically, a true reading of the Quran and the prophetic traditions teaches that there is not, and can never

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be, a contradiction between the word of God and scientific truths and human freedom. Historically, a true analysis of Muslim–Western relations teaches that the Western Renaissance became possible because of Christian encounters with Muslim societies at a time when they were still loyal to the true spirit of Islam that encourages and advances scientific studies.2 The modernist-apologetic approach depicts the West as the more successful ‘other’ that is an evolved, metamorphosed-distorted version of ideal Islam. As a result, scientific, technological and political facets of Western civilization are perceived as the partial implementation of Islamic decrees, values and traditions that Muslims themselves have forsaken. The approach offers a sophisticated spectrum of the relation between Islam and the West; at its negative end are Muslims who have deserted Islam, in the middle are Western societies that have adopted certain aspects of Islam without adopting Islam itself and at the positive end of the spectrum exists the perfect society, true to the word of God, which will be established if Muslims return to their true religion. The allure of the modernist-apologetic view was and remains its promise to Muslims torn between tradition and modernity, that they need not choose and, moreover, that the integration of the two manifests true Islam and will enable the formation of a perfect society that will take advantage of the best of both worlds. The modernist-apologetic school is not a Westernized or a liberal way of thinking as its critics and some of its supporters tend to believe. Since its inception and through its current articulations, it has been designed to defend Islam as a comprehensive framework for all aspects of life in the modern era. Creative hermeneutics of the Quran are the means; the goal is defending its supremacy. A major challenge the modernist-apologetic school faces is to avoid its misapprehension as a call for Westernization. It asserts the divide between Islam and the West in three main ways. Firstly, it explains that Western civilization, despite its advantages in certain fields, is far from being ideal; because developments in the realms of science and government are detached from the most important foundations of the true religion – faith in God and His decrees – the West only seems powerful, but in fact is flawed, corrupt and on the verge of collapse.3 Secondly, modernistapologetic writings distinguish between the technical-universal and moral-particular aspects of Western progress.4 Thirdly, they emphasize that the life and teachings of the Prophet demonstrate the legitimacy of integrating the achievements of other civilizations, yet this integration does not spell blind mimicry; one should adopt only those achievements that do not contradict Islam and those that are beneficial to Muslims.5

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The modernist-apologetic perception of the West, as adopted by mainstream Islamism, is therefore a complex worldview that connects the struggle against the Western enemy and the cautious leveraging of its scientific, technological and political prowess. The West is proximate and distant; a bitter opponent and a role model; an antithesis of the true religion that also reflects and exposes some aspects of Islam that have been neglected in Muslim societies themselves. In this sense, there is nothing exceptional in the Islamist depictions of Israel and the Zionist movement as sources of inspiration; they are merely the most daring expression of Islamism’s complex treatment of the Western ‘other’ opponent. Positioning Israel as an example is not ground-breaking but, rather, another manifestation of the intertwining duality that Islamist thought has employed since its inception. As the most vicious and cunning outpost on the front line, Israel is the most dangerous form of enemy that Islamism simultaneously strives to detach from and to investigate, ironically understanding that detachment from it is impossible without learning from it. Much like their attitude toward the West in general, this view on Israel is legitimate, due to the unique position that sees Western societies as originating from Islam, having developed in some aspects in a way true to Islam more than Muslim societies and, at the very least, embodying achievements from which Muslim societies should benefit. Islamist writing on Zionism and Israel as a source of imitation has several characteristics. The Zionist enterprise that it depicts is an imagined one, and the purpose of its investigation is not scientific but ­ideological – to assert the foundations of Islamist thought. The discourse on Zionism and Israel usually follows a formula with three components: a statement that Israel enjoys an advantage in a certain field over Arab societies; a direct or indirect description of this advantage as implementing an Islamist outlook; and, finally, a call for reform in Arab societies based on the opponent’s accomplishments that uphold Islam better than Muslims do themselves. The authors of books and essays examining the Zionist enterprise as a role model have intimate knowledge of different aspects of Israeli history and life. Long before the age of satellites and the internet, which relay Israeli life to the Arab viewer directly, Islamist thinkers demonstrated fluency in the writings of the fathers of Zionism and were able to recall in detail Israeli political and legal affairs. However, since the purpose of their writing was to serve predetermined conclusions about the reforms needed in Muslim societies, Israel and Zionism were destined to be reduced to a caricature that ignored their historical, human and ideological complexity and adjusted their realities to the Islamist

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ideal. Thus, for instance, struggling to convince that religious devotion is the true key to Israeli success, Islamists ignored, or labelled as fallacious, the secular background of Benjamin Zeev Herzl, his plan’s progressive liberal-rationalist nature and his vision regarding the separation of religious orthodoxy from politics. There is also no mention of the dominant socialist nucleus of Practical Zionism (as that would imply, according to Islamist terminology, that Zionism owes its success to a ‘man-made’ ideology), nor that half of the Jewish population in Israel today defines itself as secular. The laudatory proclamations about the Zionist movement and the State of Israel sometimes adopt Zionist narratives to such lengths that a reader can easily confuse them as enthused Zionist propaganda. Some of these descriptions, among others, are portrayals of the Zionist leadership as a shining example of personal commitment to the nation, possessing wise strategic vision, of Israeli society as a unified community and of Israeli democracy as the epitome of justice and the rule of law. For the most part, these are not variations on anti-Semitic ideas that implicitly glorify the ‘Jewish demon’; rather, they are a straightforward, complimentary portrayal. However, the accolades of the Zionist enterprise do not foreshadow writers’ empathetic treatment or acceptance of Israel’s right to exist for moral or pragmatic considerations. On the contrary, they are often followed by descriptions of the criminal nature of the Zionist enterprise and the heretic nature of Jews, alongside a faithful determination that Israel is destined to fall the moment it stands against devout Muslim societies. Islamist writers praising Israel consider themselves sober observers seeking to study their opponent’s sources of strength in order to enable the re-emergence of Muslims. Their intention is not to get closer to Zionism, but to serve the ultimate goal of ­eradicating it. Comments by Islamists on Zionism and Israel as role models are far from esoteric or rare; they appear already in early modernist-apologetic writing, and are widely expressed in works by the most prominent wasati thinkers of our generation. They are also common among Palestinian Islamists. Because Islamists view Arab regimes defeated by Israel as representatives of political orders rebelling against Islam, or at least not following its teachings, presentations of the superiority of Zionism are not considered a degradation of Islam. On the contrary, they are expressions of the fundamental weakness of regimes that are not loyal to the Islamist doctrine. However, even though the notion that Zionism should be imitated has been adopted and canonized as a convention of the mainstream Islamist faction, it usually appears on the margins of works dealing with other topics. In general it also does not appear as an

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immediate and direct response to Israeli achievements, and is much less emphasized in Islamist literature than are ideas of Israel as the essence of corruptness and human baseness. Most of the appearances of Zionism as a role model are not in conflict-related writing, but in interpretations of the weaknesses of Arab societies and the ways to redeem them. This shows that even though mainstream Islamist thought does not have an ideological or moral problem with viewing Israel as an example, it is not blind to the emotional difficulty that glorification of the enemy entails.

Zionism as a modern religious movement Islamist thought on the reasons for Arab defeats and the lessons that can be extracted from them has highlighted the religious character of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel. Islamists have described deep identification with Jewish heritage and religiosity as the driving force of the Zionist political plan, the unifying force of the society built in Israel and the motivation for Jews to risk their lives in battle. The glorification of the enemy’s religious devotion has served as a crucial analogy for the affirmation of the Islamist worldview. From the dawn of the formulation of their doctrine, and on every front, Islamists have struggled to convince that the constitution of faith-based societies regulated by religious law is not a regression that will perpetuate Muslims’ weakness but the key to their resurrection. The argument that religious belief is the secret to Jewish strength has revalidated the Islamist claim to restore Islam as a binding framework for all aspects of life. Some Islamists have presented this analogy straightforwardly, while others have used complex interpretations of the nature of Zionist religiosity to cement their position in debates with both their secularnationalistic and salafi rivals. Since the end of the 1948 war, Islamist thinking has perpetuated the perception that Zionism’s success is derived from its religiosity. Hasan al-Banna explained that the Jews were successful in forming a state because the Zionist movement was a movement of faith; it managed to remain resolute despite being condemned and reproached because of its adherence to its religious identity. Al-Banna believed that the fate of young Muslims sent into battle in the Palestinian campaign was predetermined because they had not embarked on a jihad in the way it had been decreed by Allah. He argued that Israel will continue to exist until a generation raised on the teachings of Islam defeats it, just as other devout generations have brought down non-Muslim entities in the past.6 Muhammad al-Ghazali suggested a similar linkage in a book he

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published in 1954. He determined that Israel was founded as an amalgamation of religion and state which unified its citizens, harmonized people of different origins and created a homogeneous force driven by one goal. ‘A fence of iron and fire’ fashioned by the hearts of believers defends the government in Israel. This is contrary to the situation in Arab states where religion has been severed both from governments that do not heed its teachings and from hearts that have been conquered by cheap greed. Faith will not be defeated by anything else but faith; societies that suffer from moral deterioration and social disintegration will never be victorious. Relying on the Quran and its laws is the only way to turn the tide in the struggle between Muslims and Jews.7 After the Six Day War this point of view flourished in Islamist literature. On the one hand, it portrayed the humiliating defeat of radical pan-Arabism led by Nasser and the Bath Party as the ultimate proof of the futility of Westernized ‘man-made worldviews’. On the other hand, the messianic euphoria of certain sectors of Israeli society following the 1967 conquest of East Jerusalem and the West Bank (which intensified following the rise to power of the Likud Party in 1977) crystallized the image of Zionism as a movement whose mission and flag are loyalty to religious faith rather than secular nationalism and socialism. A book by Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the lessons of the Six Day War was one of the first to associate the faith that the Jews possessed and their superiority on the battlefield. Al-Qaradawi’s academic sojourn in Qatar began in 1961 and became a permanent exile from Egypt. By the late 1960s he had already gained recognition for his textbook on religious law, published in 1960, al-Halal wal-Haram fi al-Islam (The Permissible and the Prohibited in Islam). Al-Qaradawi attributed the 1967 defeat to the loss of faith, which is the essential reason for the decline of Muslims. He emphasized that a return to religion and marching to the sound of jihad are imperative to every campaign, but especially in a struggle against international Zionism, because the Zionists arm their soldiers with ‘religious faith, motives and dreams’. To validate his claim, he stated that to the Zionists Israel is the ‘promised land’, that Ben-Gurion had declared the Torah as the basis for all Israeli actions and that Moshe Dayan had disclosed the Israelis’ sentiment that God had fought ­alongside them in the 1967 War.8 The lesson learned after the Six Day War, on the importance of faith, has appeared in al-Qaradawi’s writing ever since. In a compilation of essays collected in 1988 that summarized his apologetics (and Islamist thought in general) regarding the superiority of Islam over any other ideology, he described a conversation with a sceptic friend. His companion wondered how the Jews had overcome the Muslims; even

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if one accepts the perception that Muslims have deviated from the true religion, they are still closer to it than the Jews and therefore should have had the upper hand. Al-Qaradawi proved his companion wrong by explaining that the Jews had won because they had acted in accordance to the laws (sunan) of Allah, while the Muslims had failed to do so. Moreover, the Jews were studying while the Muslims were ignorant; the Jews were innovative while the Muslims were left behind; the Jews were united while the Muslims had abandoned each other; and the Jews invested blood, sweat and tears, while the Muslims were content only with ­shedding them.9 The analogy between the Jews’ religious devotion and the need for similar Muslim devotion received its most poignant expression in a book al-Qaradawi wrote in 1998 about the struggle over Jerusalem: If the usurpers [of the land] are fighting us out of religious motives and aspirations, we should fight them in the same manner. If they are fighting us with the Torah, we shall fight them with the Quran. If they return to Talmudic decrees, we shall return to al-Bukhari and Muslim [compilations of Prophetic traditions]. If they say, ‘we hold the Sabbath Day holy’, we shall say, ‘we sanctify Friday’. If they say, ‘the Temple’, we shall say, ‘alAqsa’. In conclusion, if they fight us carrying the flag of Judaism, we shall fight them under the banner of Islam. If they call upon Moses in recruiting their troops, we shall mobilize our troops in the names of Moses, Jesus [who are messengers according to Islam] and Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, as our right over Moses surpasses theirs.10

Similar notions have surfaced in the writings of other Islamist thinkers ever since the Six Day War. Following the 1967 defeat, Al Qaradawi’s ally Muhammad al-Ghazali reiterated his idea from the post-1948 war era. He claimed that the loss of Islamic faith had taken a strategic toll on the Arabs; the West perceived itself as being under a combined dual threat, from Russian atheism, on the one hand, and Arab atheism, on the other, and found natural allies in the non-atheist Jews.11 Yet the real burden on the Arabs who deviated from Islam was their inability to confront the Jews, who utilized the legacy of the Torah and the Bible, the Talmud and ‘all the common folk tales’ to kindle the enthusiasm of their publics.12 According to al-Ghazali, ‘we should acknowledge the religious nature of the campaign. It is not acceptable that Jews attack using religion, while the Arabs defend as divided heretics.’13 Abdallah Azzam rationalized that the Israeli victories in the campaign were driven by religion, while Umm Kulthum drove the Arabs; he argued that the Muslims would repossess Palestine only if they adopted a similar stance on religion.14 Abd al-Nasser Tawfiq al-Attar,

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who served as dean of the Law faculty of Asyut University, wrote in his book The Destruction of the New Golden Calf of the Sons of Israel that Herzl had convened the Jews in Basel [at the First Zionist Congress] based on their ambition to return to their holy land. He indicated that while the Zionist enemy outright declares that its war is a religious war, ‘Arabs shy away from their Islamic identity’.15 In an article published to commemorate fifty years since the 1948 war, Hamas spokesperson Ibrahim Ghawsha explained that one of the reasons for the Arab defeat was Jewish unity behind the religious-nationalistic motivation to establish a homeland according to the borders defined in the Torah and the Talmud, as opposed to the mere minority of Arabs that fought based on religious-nationalistic motivations.16 Faysal al-Mawlawi, the Secretary General of al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya in Lebanon (and ideological ally of al-Qaradawi in formulating the wasati doctrine on the religious law of Muslim minorities, or fiqh al-aqalliyyat al-Muslima), argued that two reasons accounted for the success of the Zionist enterprise. First, the Zionists maintained solidarity, as opposed to the discord that characterized the Arabs and the Muslims. Second, the Zionists were inspired by their religious and historical roots, the Talmud and the historical origins of the Jewish–Muslim conflict, while the Arabs denounced their Islamic roots, faith and history for fear of being portrayed as reactionary and zealous.17 In 1981 Egyptian Islamist author Hilmi Muhammad al-Qaud depicted the estrangement of Egyptian politicians from Islam – in contrast to the intrinsic connection of Israeli politicians to Judaism – as a reason for the gap between Jewish conviction and Egyptian weakness in the struggle for Palestine. His accusatory piece cited as examples, among others: the Egyptian Communication and Cultural Minister, who allowed female dancers to parade their inferior and immoral ‘merchandise’ on television; the Minister of Local Government and Youths, who permitted youth counsellors to drink wine as long as it was not done in front of the youth; and the Foreign Minister, who supported Christian Ethiopia over Muslim Eritrea when the latter was fighting for its independence. Contrary to these public anti-Muslim manifestations that robbed the Egyptian people of their identity and values, Israeli leaders brandished their Judaism and its laws at any given moment. Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir had declined to ride in a car on the Sabbath at the funeral of Winston Churchill in order to avoid desecration of their holy day. Moshe Dayan had not missed an opportunity to prove his pride in Judaism; for example, he had initiated excavations around the al-Aqsa mosque to discover Jewish relics and had written essays with morals based on the traditions of ancient Jewish history, such as

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the story of David and Goliath. Menachem Begin insisted on quoting verses from the Torah, as it was the reason for his devotion to the land, refused in the name of the Torah to negotiate over Jerusalem and defined the borders of his country according to the Torah. Al-Qaud summarized that the Egyptian ministers were infected with feelings of inferiority and tried to imitate non-Muslims in their thought, behaviour and appearance. On the other hand, the Jewish leadership was united around its faith, employed all of its resources to enhance that faith and, on the basis of its adherence to the notion that Palestine is the Promised Land, rejected a withdrawal from the occupied land and concession of Jerusalem.18 The tragedy of a victorious Jewish faith in comparison to the defeatist abandonment of Islam was exacerbated in Islamists’ eyes because of their perception that Judaism is false and fraudulent and that Muslims follow the true religion. In a three-pronged spectrum typical of the modernist-apologetic approach, Muslims who have forsaken their faith were portrayed as the weakest, Jews who follow a false religion were portrayed as stronger because even a robust false faith is better than a lack thereof, and those who believe in the true religion were portrayed as possessing the potential to achieve the strongest position. Islamist writer Muhammad Shahdi defined a situation of ‘negligence and ignorance’ where Jews fight Arabs with the false Torah at their side whereas Muslims fight without the effective weapon of the faith.19 According to al-Ghazali, Jewish victory was achieved not because of Jewish virtuosity, but because of the malaise of their opponents; the Jews converged around a falsified faith, while the most educated Arabs were ashamed of the Quran.20 In another essay, al-Ghazali ridiculed the Jews for bottling ‘holy land air’, as an example of the fallacy of Jewish culture. He wondered why, as he perceived it, the world accepted Jewish religious fables, whereas the Muslim truth was rejected. He postulated that the answer was the affectionate sentiment with which Jews engulf the fables of their belief and the scientific and financial promotion of those fables by wise politicians and astute individuals. In stark contrast, Muslim truths are not approbated because Muslims are the first to repudiate and alienate them.21 Elsewhere, al-Ghazali drew an audacious analogy between the hijra of the Prophet and his followers from Mecca to Medina and the Jewish immigration to Palestine from all over the world. The motivation for both migrations, he argued, was religious, as Muslims had wanted to establish a new religion in a country where they would be safe from persecution and the Jews had left their countries and mother tongues to found the kingdom of God – the State of Israel. However, al-Ghazali added two reservations to this analogy: the Muslim immigration had

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been independent while the Jewish one had been regulated by the British Mandate, and Muslims were adherents to the way of Allah, whereas the faith of the Jews was spurious and exploitive.22 Zionism’s success in recruiting both the believer and the sceptic alike enabled the analogical conclusion that an Islamization of the Jewish– Arab conflict does not necessitate the exclusion of secular Muslims. Muhammad Imara suggested that secular and materialistic Arab intellectuals can similarly benefit from their heritage, much like secular Zionist Jews have benefited from Talmudic fables without believing the accuracy of that heritage. He argued that this is the most effective method to recruit the necessary forces for the liberation of the stolen land.23 Some Islamists interpreted Zionism as an archetype for the merging of religion and politics and described this successful fusion as a vindication of their view of Islam as a comprehensive framework for all aspects of life, including the political. This argument is imperative in the continuous debate in Arab societies about the Islamist doctrine. The principal accusation directed toward the Muslim Brothers and its various affiliated factions is that they represent a politicization of religion aspiring for the monopolization of specific theological and religio-legal interpretations. The representation of Israel as the product of a similar politicization has reflected auspiciously on the potential conflation of religion and politics. Muhammad Jalal Kishk elaborated on the matter in a book he published in 1972. According to Kishk, Zionism relies on religion in its ideology, activities and the convictions of its followers more than any other movement. Nevertheless, as much as it is a religious movement, it is also a completely political movement, supported by justifications and action plans drawn from religion and faith, yet residing within a cultural framework to which both religious and secular Jews can be loyal. The incorporation of politics and a religious framework of identification is the reason why Zionism has achieved in less than a century what Judaism, which lacks the political element, did not achieve in three thousand years. Based on this conclusion, Kishk summarized that Egypt should learn from contemporary Jews the secret of amalgamating religion and politics, ‘and yet it seems we are unwilling to learn anything from Israel except for the hatred of the Palestinian and the ­determination to eradicate him’.24 Ibrahim al-Maqadma, a Hamas ideologist, took this idea one bold step further. To him. Zionism is not only a successful manifestation of the synthesis between religion and politics. It is the sublime, most crystallized expression of the Jewish identity, whose equivalent is the Islamist religious-political plan, which in turn is the sublime, most

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crystallized expression of Islamic identity. Al-Maqadma began his discussion by contending with the followers of secular Arab nationalism who maintain that the Zionist movement is a national movement and not a religious one because Herzl, Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion and many other leaders were secular, not religious. He argued that this claim is an outright lie because the Jewish religion is the axis around which the Zionist movement revolves. The writings and teachings of the leaders of Zionism abound with references from Judaism and its principles. A man truly committed to Judaism is by necessity bound to the Zionist movement. Therefore, a Jew who is not a Zionist is comparable to a Muslim who is unobservant and unconcerned with Islam and the status of Muslims; while a Zionist Jew is comparable to a Muslim who is committed to the laws of Islam and actively strives to establish an Islamic state and implement the way of Allah on this earth. Zionism, as the purest manifestation of Judaism, demonstrates al-Maqadma’s claim that the enemies of the Muslims are the Jews at large and not merely the Zionists, as ‘there is no difference between the two: every Jew can be a Zionist as long as he cares about the condition of other Jews, stands by the Jewish people and takes interest in its troubles. Similarly, a Muslim whose religion is weak within him can return to Islam at any given moment.’25 Islamists have perceived the profoundly religious nature of Zionism as a role model also because of the synthesis of religiosity with modernity. As mentioned, the Islamist perception, especially in its dominant wasati expression, does not discern a contradiction between the demand to return to Islam and be liberated from Western influence, and the adoption of Western technologies and political structures. Islamists believe that Zionism was successful in orchestrating the intricate process of returning to the forefathers’ heritage while adopting aspects of ­modernity. In some Islamist writing, the success of the Zionist synthesis has been portrayed as an illustration of the viability of the modernist Islamic model’s call for a similar process. Ata Allah Abu al-Sabah, a Hamas operative who later became the Minister of Prisoner Issues of the Hamas government in Gaza, claimed that the Jews ‘have turned their spurious religion into their nationality and named their country after a Prophet’, and called to ‘let us turn our religion into our nationality and its method into our regime’.26 Rashid al-Ghannushi described Israel as an example of a society loyal to its religion, that successfully absorbed ‘Western technologies and the most modern democratic experiments’, as opposed to disintegrating and degenerate Arab societies that were unsuccessful in preserving their identity.27 According to Muhammad Imara, a prominent agent of modernist-apologists, the Zionists have

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revived their dead language and through it are learning science, whereas the language of the Quran is stagnant and Arabs are learning science in languages detached from their heritage.28 In 1980, Fathi al-Shqaqi rationalized the Arab defeat in the Six Day War as the outcome of a dichotomous campaign between the Zionist Jew, enjoying the coveted fusion of modernity and tradition, and the Arab who is deficient in both. The Jew, whose identity is defined by a devotion to his faith, fights for Palestine as part of this identity and utilizes the mechanisms, methods, values and support of the modern materialistic civilization; he is a limb of that civilization’s limbs. In contrast, the Arabs who took part in the campaign attempted to try on ‘the mask of Western civilization’, but failed to adapt it to their true facial features, losing the link to their faith in the process. According to al-Shqaqi, ‘the bottom line’ is that: A man of faith who belongs to a doctrine existing for thousands of years, sanctifies the land, fights for it, and carries with him mechanisms, support and a materialistic modern civilization, opposes a man devoid of faith, ignorant of the meaning of the land that he is fighting for, and without a sensible civilizational intelligence. Well, who shall be victorious and who shall suffer defeat?29

Zionism and Israel as examples of strategy and execution Rashid Rida founded al-Manar to promote his life’s mission of reviving Muslim thought and the Muslim nation. The journal utilized Western examples to guide Muslims down the right path. In April 1898, eight months after the adjournment of the First Zionist Congress, the newly established al-Manar printed an analysis originally published in the scientific-rationalist liberal journal al-Muqtataf about the meaning of Zionism. The analysis failed to comprehend the political dimension of the new movement established by Herzl, and depicted it as a humanitarian Jewish emigration plan. While it expressed pessimism as to whether the Zionist plan would come to fruition, it also suggested that Palestine was vast and rich enough to absorb ‘many many’ more new inhabitants. In the conclusion of the cut-and-pasted analysis, Rida offered his own brief perspective of Zionism. He, too, failed to recognize the political dimension of the movement. Nevertheless, he considered the resettlement plan as a wake-up call for the Muslim nation. He urged his readers to take heed of the fact that the Jews, despite being ‘scattered among kingdoms and dispersed among countries’, were cooperating and raising funds toward the attainment of their goals. He expressed hope that the discussions in Europe on ways to develop the industry and commerce

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of Palestine would encourage similar actions on the part of Muslims. In his conclusion, he warned that the day might come when the poor and wretched Jews would take over Muslim lands, inhabit them and turn those lands’ previous owners into hired hands and their rich people into poor people.30 Four years later, in its lead article entitled ‘A Nation Resurrected after its Death’, Rida ‘exposed’ that Zionism was not innocent as it had at first seemed; rather, its real objective was to establish a Jewish Kingdom in Palestine. He wrote about the Jewish political prowess manifested in the Dreyfus affair, the Jews’ adoption of modern science and the establishment of financial institutions by the Zionist movement with the intention of achieving the movement’s goals. Rida called on the Egyptian people to imitate the Zionists and collect money for the founding of a Muslim college, and on Muslims at large to cease relying on their leaders and do their best to promote their scientific education and financial capabilities.31 With the advance of the Zionist programme, al-Manar’s tone became hostile in its analyses of Jews and Zionism. But Rida’s appreciation of the abilities and virtues that made Zionism a serious rival never vanished, not even when his writing reached a pinnacle of anti-Semitism and Islamic triumphalism. In November 1929, following the riots that had erupted in Palestine three months earlier, Rida published a comprehensive article about the history of the Jewish people, Zionist ideology and the methods used in their effort to gain sovereignty over Palestine. The article blamed ‘international Jewry’ for controlling world politics through their offshoot organization the Freemasons and through the immense fortunes it had accumulated. Accompanying these d ­ epictions – and not necessarily in contradiction to them – the article openly lauded Jewish operations and organizing skills at that moment in time. While expressing confidence that the Arabs would eventually have the upper hand because God had promised they would, Rida maintained that the Jews were one of the most influential people on the planet and particularly excelled in their solidarity, unity, heroism, scientific and economic aptitude, in their determination in promoting their goals and in their influence over other people. He described Zionist activities geared toward the establishment of an internationally recognized state in Palestine: beginning with the publication of Herzl’s The Jews’ State (which he mistook for a journal), through the clear development of a strategy in the First Zionist Congress (to conquer the lands of Palestine, to unite the Jewish people and to gain global support) and until the leveraging of the World War to manipulate Britain into granting the Jews the Balfour Declaration.32

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Zionism, and Zionist strategies specifically, were not always a major issue on Rida’s agenda; in the fifteen years leading to the 1929 riots, a crucial period in which the Zionists greatly advanced their ambitions under a favourable British mandate, Rida wrote only a handful of analyses of a movement which, according to his 1914 warning, would not settle for Palestine but would seek to extend to the river Euphrates and ethnically cleanse all those who were not ‘Israelites’ (this warning was included in an analysis by Rida that followed eleven pages of translated excerpts from an essay, Our Programme, on Zionist strategies, written in 1905 by the Zionist leader and head of the Jewish National Fund, Menachem Ussishkin, 1863–1941).33 But while the attention Rida gave to Zionism did not match his concerns, he can be credited with unique historical foresight as to the potential clout of the movement. Rida believed that the faithful must take action, reform and unite in order to realize Islam in the life of the Muslim nation and humanity at large. The Zionist movement first caught his attention not because of the threat he believed it posed, but because it personified the potential of robust strategies and unity of purpose to materialize into vigorous endeavours. His opinions on Zionism still echo in the Arab Islamist discourse today.34 The programmes and achievements of the Zionist enterprise were closely observed by the Muslim Brothers in the 1930s. Al-Nadhir, one of its mouthpieces, noted that the Jews of the world held conventions, collected money and sent weapons to their brothers in Palestine,35 and described in great detail the development of Zionist industries and services and how they facilitated Jewish domination over the Palestinians. The newspaper argued that through their control over the printing houses in Palestine, the Jews spread propaganda in the Arab world. It cautioned that, should another world war break out, Egypt might also be transformed into a Jewish National Home because of the Jewish control of the industries and financial markets in both Palestine and Egypt.36 Like Rida, Hasan al-Banna was convinced that the rich Jewish coffers played a crucial role in the conflict, and called to emulate the Zionist method of raising money. In a 1931 letter he sent to the first General Islamic Conference, held in Jerusalem by the Mufti Hajj Amin al-­Husseini, he suggested forming an Islamic fund to counterbalance the Jewish National Fund, which had been established by the Zionist movement to redeem the lands of Palestine. Al-Banna warned that the Jews were fighting Islam through their fortune, and if they obtained ownership of the land, their claim over the country would be reinforced. He announced a symbolic donation of five Egyptian pounds as an initial investment in an Islamic financial fund that would purchase lands in

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Palestine for its Muslim inhabitants. He implored the delegates of the conference not to mock the miniscule amount, as its purpose was to illustrate the Muslim Brothers’ ardent desire to bring this idea ‘from the domain of words to the realm of action’.37 Rida and al-Banna viewed Zionism as a threat in the making. Islamists who experienced at first hand the achievement of its objective as Israel became a viable political reality, and those born into that reality, further developed their perception of the Zionist strategy and its implementation as an example for the Muslims to follow. Their literature analysed the repeated Arab failures in the struggle against Zionism to argue that, in order to change the balance of power in the struggle, Muslims have to abandon the path of empty rhetoric and promote concrete and precise action. They described the establishment of the State of Israel as an example of the rekindling of a nation’s latent powers and of the advantages reaped from taking action, not sitting on one’s hands, and setting clear goals within a strict but realistic time frame. In literature published since the 1970s, Israel has validated the strategy of the main faction of Islamism both overtly and covertly. On the overt level, Israel, perceived as the product of religiously motivated activism, has affirmed the Islamist claims that religious activism is the only way to counteract Zionism. On the covert level, the description of the Zionists’ long, arduous, yet well-planned journey toward the fulfilment of their goal has served mainstream Islamists in their struggle against Qutbist Islamists. The latter, favouring a violent revolution, have been portrayed in the subtext of discussions on Zionism as too eager to act without waiting for the opportune moment.38 Al-Qaradawi explained that ‘the Jews attained their desires by defining their goal’, and pondered, ‘We complain that our enemy is devising diabolical schemes against us, [yet] until when will it continue to plan for us before we start planning for ourselves?’39 In his book about Egyptian–Israeli peace, Umar al-Tilmisani (1904–86), the third General Guide of the Brothers from the mid-1970s until his death, explained that he did not condemn nor mock Israel, as the Zionists had gradually and pragmatically been promoting their plans for over fifty years, to the extent of achieving near-control over the Middle East, while the Arabs had been treading water for centuries. He rationalized their triumph as a victory of faith (albeit erroneous), unity, perseverance and meticulous military training, as opposed to the negligible adherence to the faith, cleavage and lethargy of Arabs.40 In a book published forty years after the establishment of the State of Israel, al-Qaud wrote that the Arabs would have profited from working to build their strength during the 1950s as the Jews had done, yet they had failed to do so. He warned

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that ‘lamentations, wailing and crying’ would change nothing, as only force, which is attained only through actions, not words, would impose the will of the Muslims. Within Muslim Arabs lies the spiritual and physical power to gain advantage in the battle against the Jewish foe, yet in order to leverage that power they must forgo comfort, passivity and servility, abandon secular and pagan ways and work alongside Allah in accordance with the triumphant Islamic perception.41 Muhammad Nazzal, a member of the political bureau of Hamas, explained that the Zionist success was due to an inclination not to leave anything to chance and not to rely on miracles, in addition to the fact that Zionism had operated during a century in which the Arab nation had declined and decayed.42 Abd al-Sattar Qasim, a professor of political science at al-Najah University, argued that the most vital aspect to the progress of the Zionist enterprise was the loyalty and devotion of Zionists to the Jewish cause, and that ‘Zionists plan, build, and act in a serious and trustworthy manner. On the other side, our weakness, ignorance, and disloyalty grant them immense strategic power and allow them to accomplish achievement after achievement.’ Nevertheless, he predicted that the Zionist entity in Palestine will not have a future, as it lacks the strategic resources necessary for long-term survival in a tumultuous sea of Arabs and Muslims.43 Al-Maqadma claimed that a comparison of Jewish and Arab actions at the beginning of the conflict revealed a clear distinction: the Jews had excelled in planning in advance and relentlessly working until their goal had been reached, while the Arabs had been entangled in an inner struggle with the Turks. His book portrayed a historical narrative supporting this claim. Already by the First Zionist Congress, the Jews had adopted the plan devised by Herzl in his book The Jews’ State, whose principles were to gain the support of the world’s powers and to promote the agricultural colonization of Palestine. Following this Congress, the Jews had held seventeen more until their state was established. They had always taken the initiative and persevered on their premeditated course. On the other hand, the Muslims were always surprised by the schemes of their enemies, reacting to conflicts devised by the Jews instead of initiating them. Often their actions were random and devoid of planning and commitment. While the Jews had embarked on an organized mission to consolidate their rule in Palestine under the unified leadership of the Zionist Congress, Muslims had been preoccupied with leadership struggles, able to decide on one official leader only when it was too late and the Jewish presence in Palestine was a fact. Much like Rida and al-Banna six decades before him, al-Maqadma was impressed by Jewish financial enterprises devised to fulfil Zionist

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objectives. According to his book, despite their notorious miserliness, the Jews had been able to create funds and financial institutions, each specializing in generating a specific type of resource, combining to contribute to the one goal of building a national home in Palestine. Until today, these institutions had gathered vast amounts of money to support the existence of the Zionist entity. While Jewish funds flowed like water for the sake of building their national homeland, Muslim attempts to receive aid to preserve their lands, to purchase weapons and to support jihadi warriors were indolent and unsuccessful.44 Ibrahim Assal al-Ubaydi, a columnist for the Jordanian Muslim Brothers’ journal al-Sabil, describes the decay of Muslim societies, as compared to the power attained by the ‘gruesome’ Israeli society, which has obtained nuclear weapons, a powerful air force, monstrous tanks, advanced industry and a substantial physical infrastructure of streets and buildings. In his opinion, the explanation for the discrepancy between the two sides is neither the intelligence nor the extraordinary genius of the Jews but the independent, self-reliant nature of the Zionist movement; it did not entrust its fate to anyone, not even to the powers that assisted in its inception, and was determined to remain strong under any condition. Even with these accolades, and in contradiction to them, al-Ubaydi argues that Israel is a cowardly and weak society, defeated both inwardly and outwardly, that loves life and hates death.45 Islamist writing is vastly impressed by the fact that the Zionist vision was attained within a predetermined timetable. It is the ultimate proof of a meticulous and patient strategy and of the futility of a stand-alone effort unsupported by strategy. On the fifty-year jubilee of the State of Israel, Ishaq Farhan, the Chair of the Shura Committee of the Islamic Action Front (the parliamentary branch of the Muslim Brothers in Jordan), noted that the Zionists had developed their enterprise in stages, based on thorough and detailed planning in which each stage begot the next one: first the thinking and planning stage, next execution and supervision, then the inception of the State of Israel on the remains of the body of the Palestinian nation, followed by the expansionist stage, and then the current stage of peace without the return of land, all of which would be followed by the final stage of eliminating the Arabs.46 In the early 1990s, Abd al-Latif Arabiyyat was the Chair of the Jordanian Parliament, and at the time of Israel’s fiftieth anniversary he was serving as the General Secretary of the Islamic Action Front. He attributed the success of the Zionist enterprise to the detailed execution of its plans; the Zionist movement had been established a hundred years ago, the Zionist entity in Palestine had been established fifty years ago and Arab recognition of this entity had been achieved fifty years after

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that.47 Abdallah al-Samman (1917–2007), a thinker, journalist, a disciple of al-Banna and a personal friend of Sayyid Qutb, was imprisoned by Nasser’s regime in 1965, was released in 1970 and like other prominent Islamists in exile became an activist in Saudi pan-Islamic organizations. In January 1986 he participated in a conference on Muslim minorities convened by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (al-Nadwa al-Alamiyya lil-Shabab al-Islami). The Assembly was founded in 1972 as the ‘youth branch’ of the Muslim World League, which had been established a decade earlier as a Saudi–Islamist organization dedicated to the propagation of Islam. Al-Samman’s lecture at the conference highlighted the importance of formulating a strategy for the spread of Islam in the West. He claimed that improvised, individual dawa activities would fail to produce results, regardless of the resources invested in them, and presented two historical examples to showcase the necessity of formulating a systematic plan. One was the strategy devised by the Prophet (while he was being persecuted in Mecca) that was designed to destroy the jahili faith and build Islam on the remains of paganism. The other example, presented only after al-Samman had asked the forgiveness of the audience, was the strategy of the world Zionist movement, which had materialized in accordance with the timetable set by Benjamin Zeev Herzl, the father of the Jewish State. Al-Samman read to the audience from Herzl’s diary the words he had written a few days after the end of the First Zionist Congress, fifty years before the establishment of Israel: Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word – which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly – it would be this: At Basel, I founded the State of the Jews. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.48

For Islamists, the Zionists’ ability to spread their narratives and attain approval for them from the international community served as additional proof of the significance of planning and implementation. The way in which the memory of the Holocaust has been used by the Zionists for propaganda provides an example. An article by the cultural editor of Hamas’ journal called for the establishment of an institution like Yad Vashem that would commemorate the Palestinian victims of the conflict. According to the article, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem represents the successful transformation of a ‘fable’ into a guilt complex for millions of Europeans that in turn silences any criticism of Israel. The author enthusiastically describes how thousands of visitors from around the world go to Yad Vashem every year, how every official visitor to the ‘Zionist entity’ stops there and how it contains

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62 million documents, 300,000 photographs, 112,000 books and a research centre. He concludes: ‘Where is our Yad Vashem? Where are the photographs and the documents? Where are the centres that will breed [people] who understand the Palestinian problem? It is true that a few countries have museums dedicated to the Palestinians, but they remain small and modest, and [operate] in most cases due to the efforts of individuals, and do not meet academic criteria.’49

Israeli–Jewish diaspora relations as an example From the early 1980s, Islamist writings encouraged the Muslim world and Muslim minorities in the West to heed Israeli relations with the Jewish diaspora as an example of cross-border religious-nationalist unity. As demonstrated in the previous pages, early manifestations of this notion had been introduced in Rida’s and in the Muslim Brothers’ writings in reference to the early days of Zionism. The notion was developed as Islamist thinkers learned, sometimes at first hand after visiting Muslim communities in the West or even sojourning there, how world Jewry tremendously assists the Zionist enterprise in three spheres: direct financial aid; moral support and propaganda; and the exertion of pressure on Western governments to act in accordance with Israeli interests. Highlighting the advantage of Israeli relations with the Jewish diaspora served the fundamental Islamist perception that Muslims are all one nation and should gradually unite and establish a cohesive religious-political entity. From the 1980s, the Israel–diaspora relationship was discussed in relation to two key and interconnected themes of Islamist thought. First is the ‘cultural attack’ theory, which posits that ‘Westernization agents’ operating in Muslim societies play an influential role in disseminating Western values and the undermining of Islam. Several Islamists suggested counteracting the ‘cultural attack’ by combining the defence and purification of Muslim lands from harmful Western influences with peaceful engagement on the opponent’s soil in a way that would strengthen Islam. The Jewish diaspora was portrayed in this context as an especially successful example of a small minority in the West capable of serving its nation’s interests. The second theme is the perception of the Muslim migrant as a missionary, which has developed in Islamist thought since the early 1980s and was systemized and institutionalized in the late 1990s, particularly after the establishment of the European Council for Fatwa and Research under the leadership of al-Qaradawi. This concept (which served as one of the foundations of the wasati doctrine for fiqh al-aqalliyyat al-Muslima – the religious

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law of Muslim minorities) seeks to address the new-found reality of millions of Muslims who have willingly settled in non-Muslim countries. It sets forth two conditions whose fulfilment has rendered legitimate living among infidels: maintaining Islamic identity and supporting Islam both through propagating the faith and through advocating Muslim causes all around the world.50 The concept of the ‘missionary migrant’ was in part inspired and legitimized by the example of Jews who are citizens loyal to their countries, while simultaneously vigorously promoting the interests of Israel. Hassan Muhammad Hassan’s book Ways of Fighting the Ideological Attack on the Muslim World, published by the Muslim World League in Saudi Arabia in 1981, presented the Zionist experience as a vital source of inspiration for Muslim societies in three different ways. Firstly, Muslims must ensure comprehensive Islamic education from cradle to maturity, similarly to Israel where the school, the home, the media, the army, the workplace, the social clubs and the cultural institutions are all links in the same chain. This chain serves one goal that imbues citizens with a sense of belonging and willingness to sacrifice in the name of the Zionist ideology.51 Secondly, Muslims residing in the West must promote Islamic interests, much as the Jews promote the interests of Zionism. Hassan emphasizes that Jewish prominence in the United States is due to their high participation rates in elections and astute organizing.52 Thirdly, Islamic preaching should be intensified, including among Muslim minorities. One method to achieve this, among others, is through the founding of Islamic youth summer camps similar to the Zionist camps that take place in Israel. Hassan recalls Jewish students whom he met while studying in New York, who had embarked on short or prolonged visits to the ‘Zionist entity’ where they defended and worked on kibbutzim, earning less than they would have done at home. Upon their return to America, they were filled with pride and a desire to spread the Zionist ideology.53 One of the first appearances, albeit unsystematic, of the concept of the ‘missionary migrant’ whose duty is to promote Islam was in Muhammad al-Ghazali’s book Islam Outside its Borders – How We Should Contemplate on It, published in 1984. The book began with an analysis of reports in French newspapers about the conversion to Islam of thousands of French people.54 It concluded with the claim that if the Muslim nation would strive toward the fulfilment of this goal, the masses of Muslim immigrants to the West would not only preserve their religion but would also become a vanguard in the spread of Islam.55 As an example of what a man can accomplish for the benefit of his people al-Ghazali described in detail the story of Chaim Weizmann and

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his endeavours to bring forth the Balfour Declaration. Al-Ghazali, in a fervour reminiscent of Zionist textbooks, wrote that Weizmann was a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Manchester who, in 1916, resourcefully invented a method to produce acetone from cornflour. This had salvaged the war effort of the allied forces, who desperately needed vast quantities of the liquid, which was used to dissolve nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose in the manufacture of explosives used in bullets and shells. When asked what he wanted in exchange for his brilliant invention, Weizmann refused any monetary compensation that would allow him to buy ‘a mansion or build a house decorated with mosaics and ornaments’, as he believed in ‘his people’s lie [that is, their claim over Palestine] as an ideology worthy of sacrificing all materialistic possessions’. Instead of wealth or fame for himself, Weizmann implored the British leadership to pass the Balfour Declaration. As an experienced chemist, familiar with the specific rules governing the reactions of atoms and particles, he predicted the reaction that would follow this declaration and how the Zionists could utilize it toward their long-awaited goal. For al-Ghazali, the image of Weizmann as a scientific prodigy whose genius had advanced his people summarized the Muslim tragedy of recent generations: ‘This Jewish scientist served his tribesmen and tribe! He thought of his people and not of himself, served his faith and not his desires, and used his scientific gift to unite the dispersed believers of his faith.’ One cannot find people like the first President of Israel among Muslims; some Muslims are hungry for respect, only interested in ruling over states established on the ruins of the Caliphate. Some are godless scientists, and the sole aim of their research is the accumulation of money for themselves and their children. And some are devoutly religious, whose lives revolve around trifles, modesty and over-purification, not acknowledging the importance of science.56 In 2001 Al-Qaradawi published a systematic and comprehensive book on his approach to the religious law of Muslim minorities. Legitimizing Muslim migration, he argues that because Islam is a universal religion and the West today leads the world politically, economically and culturally, it is imperative that Islam has a presence in the West. He goes as far as arguing that if such a presence did not exist, Muslims would have to create it in order to safeguard the identity of Muslim minorities and spread Islam among non-Muslims. The Islamic presence is also ­important in order not to leave the West totally under Jewish influence.57 A short fatwa published by al-Qaradawi in 2006 methodically and succinctly summarizes his position on the duties of Muslim minorities, offering two stipulations for the legitimacy of Muslims permanently

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living in infidel Western countries. They should actively maintain their and their families’ religious identity, and act in support of Islam, both by proselytizing and through actions benefiting oppressed Muslims around the world. Al-Qaradawi again calls on the immigrants to follow the Jewish example by adopting and championing the rights of their nation: Such kind of duty involves championing the Cause of Palestine, Iraq, Kosova, Chechnya (and other places where Muslims are facing great ordeals), with the sincere intention to return the usurped rights to their legitimate owner. Nowadays we see the Jews, from the four corners of the world, championing and backing Israel, and we call on all Muslims in all parts of the world, saying that it is high time to champion the rights of their Muslim umma.58

The praises of Israeli democracy For wasati Islamist thinkers and their supporters, Israeli democracy also provides an example from which Muslims should learn in shaping the reality of their lives. Three facets of its democracy have received accolades – free, fair and periodic elections; respect for civil liberties; and the rule of law that does not distinguish between the powerful and the meek. The appreciation of Israeli democracy is one expression of wasati Islamists’ approach to Western democracy as a whole. As part of the efforts to prove that Islam is compatible with modernity, the modernist-apologetic project of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries claimed that the principle of consultation (shura) appearing in the Quran and the Prophetic traditions is the Islamic equivalent of democracy as it was developed in the West. Hasan al-Banna, who operated within a political reality where principles of parliamentary democracy were integrated into the framework of a constitutional monarchy, accepted this reality, but he declared that competition between political parties breaches Islamic law because Islam demands the unity of its believers. His wasati successors, mainly al-Ghazali and al-Qaradawi, adopted the approach that shura is democracy in Islam.59 They called for the adoption of certain elements of Western democracy and the rejection of others, based on the conception that it is legitimate for a Muslim to learn from the achievements of the infidels so long as they are not in contradiction with the laws of Islam.60 According to their writings, Islamic democracy is identical to Western democracy in two respects: the leadership must be chosen in a free election and must concede power once it loses the confidence of the voters,61 and the regime must respect civil liberties.62 The differences between the democracies are threefold:

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(a) Islamic democracy, as opposed to the Western one, encompasses all aspects of life;63 (b) ordained by God, the existence of Islamic democracy is an unalterable religious decree, predating by hundreds of years Western liberal democracy, which evolved as a man-made ideology;64 (c) Islamic democracy does not permit the enactment of legislation that negates the laws given to humankind by God; it cannot permit what He has prohibited, or prohibit what He has permitted.65 This reserved-integrative perception of Western democracy has become prominent since the mid-1980s as a result of two processes. On the one hand, the notion of the universality of liberal democracy has returned to the centre of the Arab political discourse following the ‘third wave of democratization’, and particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the perception that views Islam as inherently contradicting democracy, and moreover doubts whether in practical terms an Islamist movement can attain power by elections, was heightened among both Qutbist factions, which had receded from mainstream Islamist movements, and conservative Islamists, mainly those that found academic shelter in Saudi Arabia. Based on the reserved-integrative approach, Islamist thinkers could claim that they were democratic, yet there was no need to replace Arab tyrannies with carbon copies of the Western form of government. Moreover, that the shura-based regime, the true form of an Islamic regime, merged the advantages of the Western form of government while remaining pure and unscathed by its flaws. Islamists viewed the undemocratic regimes ruling Arab societies as a severe affront in need of rectification. The affront was all the more agonizing in their minds because, while Islam had brought democracy to humankind before it developed in the West, it was in the West that political liberties flourished, whereas in Muslim societies they had vanished. Islamist apologetics focused on representing Islamic traditions as the authentic manifestations of political patterns developed in the West. They also wondered why the infidels were implementing the divine decree for democracy, whereas Muslims were ignoring it. Al-Ghazali explained that just as the sciences that developed in the West are universal, so are aspects of Western administration and government not necessarily in contradiction to Islam. Thus, he wondered when Muslims would be able to enjoy the freedom of expression and the safeguarding of human dignity that are common in the West.66 American journalists, who had not hesitated to ask President Kennedy who had paid for his wife’s trip to Europe, had reminded al-Ghazali of the story of Khalifa Umar’s garb. Salman al-Farisi, one of the first Companions of the Prophet, asked Khalifa Umar from where he got his long

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clothes.Umar’s son Abdallah was quick to respond that he had given his fabrics to his tall father, so that he could dress appropriately. To al-Ghazali, this critical dialogue portrayed how freedom of expression, which the West had achieved only after centuries of bloodshed, had been granted to the Muslims as a gift from God.67 In another context he wrote that General Charles de Gaulle had left office after being defeated in a public referendum, whereas in Arab political reality generals who suffer defeat insist on staying in power.68 Articulations of Islamist fascination with Israeli democracy can be found in Islamist writings from the early 1980s. Their point of departure is similar to that of deliberations on Western democracy in general. It is unbearable that Jews, as infidels and exploiters, should uphold a form of regime that is closer to the one decreed by God than the regimes that exist in Muslim societies. The emphasis on Israel as a democratic country that has overcome undemocratic Arab ones serves as proof of the costs of tyranny and the might of democracy. In the early 1980s al-Ghazali wrote about his ‘sadness and heartbreak [that] since the establishment of the State of Israel, elections there were never forged, while we [Muslims] are masters of creating [fake election] results, as the world knows well’.69 He recalled a series of events spanning from the pre-1977 governmental change in Israel to the twilight days of the second Begin government, proving that the Israeli leadership is subject to the will of the people and to the rule of law: the resignation of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin because of a financial transgression committed by his wife; the criminal charges brought against Minister of Religious Affairs Aharon Abu-Hatzera; the resignation of Ariel Sharon from his position as Defence Secretary following the conclusions of the Kahan Commission; and the retirement of Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the height of the First Lebanon War.70 The role of women in Israeli society in general and in the political realm in particular provided another reason for al-Ghazali to take heed. Women’s rights are a seminal source of contention between wasati Islamists and their opponents, especially salafis. So much so, that al-Ghazali, who spent part of the 1970s in Saudi Arabia, declared that certain religious jurists demonstrate flawed or false knowledge of religion when they publish the ‘harshest [decrees], have the worst utterances’, and ‘get a fever when women’s rights are involved’. Those jurists regard the niqab (full face covering) as the sixth pillar of Islam, even though it impedes women’s humanity and their mobility.71 According to al-Ghazali, it is imperative that Muslim women should be integrated into professions like medicine, teaching and the dissemination of religion, while maintaining the required decrees of modesty. He testifies

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that he met Muslim women who were excellent mothers while simultaneously running successful schools, working as accomplished doctors and raising exemplary families. Israeli society, where women successfully fulfil important roles in the realms of politics, social services and the military, proved to him the benefits of incorporating women into senior positions. This was epitomized in the character of Golda Meir, whom al-Ghazali addressed admiringly in a number of his works. As the Israeli prime minister, he wrote, Meir ‘exposed the shame of some male Arab leaders and devastatingly defeated them’.72 In another study he suggested that, given that Indira Gandhi had defeated Pakistani generals and Golda Meir had defeated Arab generals, it would be better for the Arabs to be led by a virtuous woman than by males who boasted in their military decorations.73 Jewish women, he argued in yet another study, were at the forefront of Israeli military triumphs: I have noticed that the Jewish woman had a hand in the humiliating defeat we suffered. She founded the State of Israel on the remains of our bodies, and supplied social and military services to her religion. Furthermore, the Jewish woman was the one who led her people and disgraced a group of mustachioed and bearded Arab politicians in the Six Day War and the ensuing wars.74

Al-Qaradawi commended Israeli democracy as a role model in reference to another sensitive context. In the elections of 1996, the Israeli elite and the international community had supported the dovish candidate, Shimon Peres; however, the hawkish candidate, Benjamin Netanyahu, had won. Al-Qaradawi analysed the results in one of his sermons: Oh brothers, before I get off my seat I want to say something about the results of the Israeli elections. Arabs had high hopes for Peres, but he failed. This is one of the things we like about Israel, what we wish for our countries. Thanks to a meagre margin [of votes] he [Shimon Peres] succumbed and the people are sovereign. They do not have the four or five ‘number 9s’ that we know [from elections] in our countries: 99.99 per cent. What is that?! If Allah had participated in elections he would not have received such rates. [Elections in Arab countries] are nothing but a lie, forgery and deceit. We congratulate Israel on the way it conducted itself.75

Al-Qaradawi’s accolades engendered bitter salafi criticism. Muhammad Ibn Salih al-Uthaymin (1928–2001), a member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars and the second-in-command religious authority in the kingdom, accused him of heresy and demanded an apology.76 When the  topic of Israel or Zionism is addressed, discord of this sort is frequent. It demonstrates the deep-seated controversy that divides the

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different contemporary factions and political parties that speak in the name of Islam. Wasati Islamists represent the more pragmatic portion of this debate; opposition to them, particularly from Saudi-based salafis, demands an unequivocal, insurmountable partition between Islam as the true religion, and heretics and their values, customs and institutions. Al-Ghannushi, another prominent wasati Islamist, integrated the perception that Israel is strengthened by its democracy with a conclusion confirming the Islamist view on the unity of religion and politics. In an article published in 1993 in response to the signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO, the leader of Tunisian Islamism claimed that Israeli ideological-religious unity had enabled its development into a democracy, and the lack of such harmony within Arab societies prevents them from evolving in a similar manner. Thus, the Zionist model teaches that Islamization of Arab societies is a prerequisite for their democratization. The leader of Tunisian Islamism argued that, aside from extremely marginal elements, unanimity exists among the Jewish citizens of Israel regarding the relationship of their state to Jewish history and culture, and the desire to expand and to conquer the entire Middle East which is epitomized in the biblical verse, ‘Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.’77 He noted that although the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, and his fundamentalist Minister of the Interior, Arieh Deri, differed in their perspectives, they both agreed about the Jewish nature of the state and the need to limit the percentage of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to twenty, so that the character of the state would not change. Because Israeli society is united behind its religious identity, life can be organized based on political freedom. The transfer of power from one political camp to another is possible, as it does not represent a victory of one oppositional doctrine over the other but, rather, a shift in balance between family members who agree on the objective and stand divided only over the means. Drawing from his belief that a conspiracy was behind the secularization and Westernization of independent Tunisia, al-Ghannushi argued that an ideological-religious harmony of the Israeli kind is missing from Arab politics. In their forced modernization process, the Arab elites in power were detached from the cultural riches of Islam and its heritage, and in fact prolonged the colonialist rule that has no connection to Islam.78 Al-Ghannushi presented the aforementioned theory in London as the exiled leader of the al-Nahda movement. In June 2011, almost two decades later, Hamadi al-Jibali, the Secretary General of the movement, relied on Israeli democracy for a simpler analogy. He claimed that Israel

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represents proof that a country can be democratic even when it includes political parties whose reference is religious.79 Al-Jibali made these comments during a visit to Washington, DC in order to ease American concerns that the first free election in Tunisia would be won by al-Nahda. In response to his speech, anonymous hackers broke into al-Ghannushi’s website and demanded to know the ‘real reason’ behind the praise his party attributed to the ‘exploitive Zionist entity’.80 Indeed, al-Nahda won the elections held in October of that year (even if not by an absolute majority) and al-Jibali became prime minister. Islamist writing has dealt with Israeli political corruption scandals in two ways. On the one hand, they have been presented as testimony to the decay of the Zionist enterprise, thus confirming the common Islamist view of Western societies as hedonistic and materialistic, whose demise is inevitable. On the other hand, the prosecution of corrupt politicians has served as a manifestation of the authenticity of Israeli democracy, where the rulers are accountable to their voters and are equal before the law. A lead opinion columm, published in 2008 on the internet portal al-Islam al-Yawm that serves as a stage for Islamist ideas, discussed the resignations of South African President Thabo Mbeki and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert due to corruption scandals. The anonymous op-ed, posted on the portal run by Salman al-Awda, a prominent leader of opposition to the monopoly of the House of Saud in the 1990s, argued that the discrepancies between the treatment of rulers in the Arab world and in the West are regrettable. It suggested that the countries that demand accountability and, if necessary, the resignation of their leaders are viable countries capable of achievements and rising to challenges.81 An article in Hamas’ journal presented a similar notion, writing that Israel was doomed to collapse soon, due to political corruption, draft dodging from the army, negative immigration and the growth in alcohol and drug abuse. Nevertheless, the article added that Zionist society would not collapse immediately, of its own accord, without Arab and Islamist action, because of the support it received from the West and because of its transparency and representative democratic institutions, which allowed it to tackle problems and find solutions.82 A common notion in Islamist writing is that the West excessively emphasizes the rights of the individual over the needs of society. This is one of the main pillars of the Islamist perception of the West’s decline and inevitable extinction. However, the importance that Israeli society assigns to safeguarding individual rights is not necessarily perceived as a weakness. Rather, it is viewed as an example of the solidarity of the Israelis and a source of strength that is achievable only within a democratic regime where the government is accountable to its voters. This line

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of thought was demonstrated in the prisoner exchange in October 2011, where Hamas returned the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. The common Islamist interpretation of the deal depicted it (as it did previous deals) as a sign of Israeli weakness and a success for the struggle conducted in the name of Islam. Alongside the euphoria, a less common interpretation of the deal incorporated a decisive conclusion about the advantages of democracy.  A Syrian Muslim Brothers activist noted that ‘the individual is sacred in the eyes of the Zionists and the West, while to our governments he is worth nothing, to the extent that a Zionist is worth a thousand of us’.83 The Muslim Brothers’ leader in Jordan from 2006 to 2008, Salim al-Falahat, wrote that the Gilad Shalit deal evoked happiness and sorrow alike: happiness for the release of the prisoners, and sorrow concerning the Arab realization of the gap between the enemy’s concern for one prisoner, and Arab regimes’ lack of concern for thousands of Palestinian and Arab prisoners. The enemy, albeit an exploitative one, should be appreciated for respecting its citizens to such a degree that it was willing to liberate one soldier in exchange for a thousand jihadi leaders. The significance afforded to the lives of citizens has a strategic meaning, as it strengthens their sense of belonging to their exploitative country. Arab rulers refrain from doing so because they do not wish their people to govern ­themselves and improve their inauspicious position.84

Conclusion The plethora of Islamist writing about the Zionist enterprise as a role model teaches that despite the firmness of the demand for Israel’s elimination and its common portrayal as criminal and corrupt, Islamists do not interpret it one-dimensionally. Islamist texts praise Israel as a country that has defeated its enemies due to its faith, sacrifice, strategic planning, scientific and technological excellence, the enlistment of diaspora Jewry and the respect shown for democratic values. To Islamists, the bitter Israeli enemy is not entirely an evil ‘other’; it is also an ‘other’ that personifies qualities, values and institutions that Arab societies must adopt if they wish to be revived. This dual approach toward the enemy is not unique. It represents a duality inherent to modern Islamist thought, and especially to its  wasati  faction, denouncing the West while identifying the Islamic origins of certain facets of it, and acknowledging the need to study the methods of the ‘other’ as a prerequisite for independence and revival. To Islamists, the elements within Israeli society that are worthy of imitation

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– first and foremost the religiosity of Jewish society – are a distorted reflection of values rooted in Islam. Even though Islamists demonstrate curiosity and openness toward Israel they do not empathize with it. Similarly to the West as a whole, Zionism and Israel serve as role models for Islamists only so long as they can be represented and understood as validating the worldview that calls for the reinstatement of the true religion as a comprehensive framework for all aspects of life.

Notes  1 M. Mubarak, ‘Qiraa fi waqi al-muwajaha al-maydaniyya bayna al-Haraka alIslamiyya wal-Haraka al-Sahyuniyya’ (6.4.2010): www.dakahliaikhwan.com/ viewarticle.php?id=4289 (accessed June 2012).  2 For expressions of the modernist-apologetic notion that Islam is not a rival of freedom and scientific progression, and that Western renaissance is rooted in Islam, see: A. A. al-Juzu (ed.), al-Islam Din al-Ilm wal-Madaniyya lil-Shaykh Muhammad Abduh (Beirut: Manshurat Dar Maktubat al-Hayah, 1989), pp. 64, 90, 96–7, 110, 140–4, 157–60; ‘Shubha wa-Jawabuha’, al-Manar, 1 (1898), p. 733; H. al-Banna, ‘Risala nahwa al-nur’, in Majmuat Rasail al-Imam al-Banna (Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi wal-Nashr al-Islamiyya, 2006), pp. 166–7; ‘Risala bayna al-ams wal-yawm’, Ibid, p. 520; S. Qutb, al-Adala al-Ijtimaiyya fi al-Islam (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2006 [late 1940s]), p. 202; M. Qutb, Jahiliyyat al-Qarn al-Ishrin (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, n.d.), pp. 32–7; M. Qutb, Waqiuna al-Muasir (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2006, written in 1986), pp. 83–4; Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-Hulul al-Mustawrada wa-Kayfa Jannat ala Ummatina (Muassasat al-Risala, 1974 [1971]), pp. 44–5; Y. al-Qaradawi, Tarikhuna al-Muftara Alayhi (Cairo, Dar al-Shuruq, 2008 [2005]), p. 108; M. Imara, al-Ghazw al-Fikri: Wahm Am Haqiqa? (Beirut and Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1997 [1989]), pp. 249–69.  3 The modernist-apologetic theory on the decline of the West depicts the rival civilization as the possessor of great military, financial and technological abilities that nevertheless substituted materialism for faith and values and thus is sure to collapse. The theory highlights the hedonism, individualism, disintegration of the family, addictions, sexual epidemics and mental distresses that, so it argues, characterize the West, and offers Islam as the only possible remedy. While argumentations and emphases have changed throughout the years, in general, contemporary Islamist prophecies on the decline of the West resemble those composed by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectuals of the al-Manar school. For an analysis on this theory and the reasons for its centrality in modernistapologetic thought see: U. Shavit, Islamism and the West: From ‘Cultural Attack to Missionary Migrant’ (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 97–138.  4 A point stressed already in early modernist-apologetic texts was that adoption of Western scientific and technological methods does not necessitate adoption

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of Western moral corruption. The Muslims who will learn sciences from the West will not relinquish their sublime values. See ‘al-Rihla al-Urubiyya, Part 6’, al-Manar, 23 (October 1922), pp. 635–40. Contemporary modernist-apologetic texts stress the difference between universal scientific theories and scientific theories that exemplify Western exceptionalism. See, for example, on the theory of evolution: Imara, al-Ghazw al-Fikri: Wahm Am Haqiqa?, pp. 110–25.  5 Modernist-apologetic thought stresses that the only criteria that should determine the embrace of Western innovations are (a) whether they are in line with Islamic norms; (b) whether they can assist the Muslims. See: M. Imara, al-Istiqlal al-Hadari (Cairo: Nahdat Misr, 2007), pp. 188–92. Muhammad al-Ghazali emphasized that the non-religious sciences are universal; the West excels in the sciences on all fronts and if Muslims wish to excel as well, they must become the students of the West in non-religious fields. See: M. al-Ghazali, alGhazw al-Thaqafi Yamtaddu fi Faraghina (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2005 [1998]), pp. 45, 101.  6 M. A. Q. Abu-Faris, al-Fiqh al-Siyasi ind al-Imam Hasan al-Banna (Amman: Dar al-Bashir lil-Thaqafa wal-Ulum, 1999), p. 113.  7 M. al-Ghazali, Fi Mawkib al-Dawa (Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, 1954), pp. 217–18.  8 Y. al-Qaradawi, Dars al-Nakba al-Thaniyya: Limadha Inhazamna … wa-Kayfa Nantasiru (n.p., 2nd edition, 1969), p. 73. For another early example see an article in the journal of the Syrian Muslim Brothers that analysed statements by Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and other Israeli officials according to which Israel would never concede Jerusalem. The article depicted the Israeli efforts for the judification of the city and concluded that the Arabs must also highlight the religious dimension of the conflict: ‘Ard al-Nubuwwat li-Filastin Kalima: al-Bud al-Dini … wal-Quds’, Hadarat al-Islam, 10 (February–March 1969), p. 82.  9 Y. al-Qaradawi, Min Ajli Sahwa Rashida: Tajaddud al-Din … wa-Tanahhud bi-al-Dunya (Cairo and Beirut: Dar al-Shuruq, 2001), p. 159. 10 Y. al-Qaradawi, al-Quds Qadiyyat Kull Muslim (Doha:, 1998), www.almostafa.info/data/arabic/depot/gap.php?file=000806-www.al-mostafa.com.pdf, p. 18; on this analogy see also: Ummatuna Bayna Qarnayn (Cairo: Dar alShuruq, 2002 [2000]), pp. 131–3. 11 Al-Ghazali, al-Ghazw al-Thaqafi Yamtaddu fi Faraghina, p. 126. 12 Ibid., p. 94. 13 Ibid., p. 130. 14 A. Azzam, Hamas: al-Judhur al-Tarikhiyya wal-Mithaq (Peshawar: Markaz Shahid al-Azzam al-Ilami, n.d.), p. 23; A. Maliach and S. Shay, From Kabul to Jerusalem: al-Qaeda, the Worldwide Islamic Jihad and the Israeli-Palestinian Confrontation (Tel-Aviv: Matar, 2009, in Hebrew), p. 158. 15 ‘A. A. T. al-Attar, Tadmir Ijl Bani Israil al-Jadid (Cairo: Muassasat al-Bustani lil- Tibaa, 2002), p. 90. 16 I. Ghawsha, ‘Nakbat Am 1948: Murajaa wa-Muhawala lil-Fahm’, Filastin alMuslima (May 1998), p. 56.

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17 ‘Al-Shaykh Faysal Mawlawi Amin Amm al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya fi Lubnan: “Hunaka Mashru Sahyuni Wahid wa-Amamahu Mashruat Arabiyya waIslamiyya bi-Adad al-Anzima wal-Ahzab wal-Mufakkirin”’, al-Sabil (19– 25.5.1998), p. 9. 18 H. M. al-Qaud, al-Sulh al-Aswad: Ruya Islamiyya li-Mubadarat al-Sadat walTariq ila Filastin (Cairo: Dar al-Itisam, 1988), pp. 29–32. 19 M. Shahdi, Suqut al-Ilmaniyya wa-Nihayat Israil (al-Mansura: Dar al-Wafa, 1995), pp. 141–2. 20 See in http://al-mostafa.info/data/arabic/depot/gap.php?file=001035-www.almostafa.com.pdf. 21 Al-Ghazali, al-Ghazw al-Thaqafi Yamtaddu fi Faraghina, pp. 128–9. 22 W. ‘A. Abu-Zayd, ‘al-Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali yuqarinu bayna hijrat alMuslimin ila al-Madina wa-rihlat al-Yahud ila Filastin’ (n.d.): www.alghazaly. org/index.php?id-51 (accessed June 2012). 23 M. Imara, Islamiyyat al-Sira hawla al-Quds wa-Filastin (Al-Sadis min October: Nahdat Misr, 1998), p. 34. 24 M. J. Kishk, Wa-Dakhalat al-Khayl al-Azhar (Beirut: al-Dar al-Ilmiyya, 1972), pp. 497–508. 25 I. al-Maqadma, Maalim fi al-Tariq ila Tahrir Filastin (place of publication not mentioned: Muassasat al-Yam, 1994), pp. 19–20. 26 ‘A. A. al-Subh, ‘Ila al-Nakba’, al-Risala (14.5.1998), p. 9. 27 R. al-Ghannushi, al-Qadiyya al-Filastiniyya ala Muftaraq Tariqayni (n.p., 1983), pp. 36–7. 28 N. A. Sad, ‘Hiwar maa al-mufakkir al-Islami duktur Muhammad Imara’ (19.3.2002): www.islamweb.net/media/index.php?page=article&lang=A&id= 10357 (accessed June 2012). 29 As quoted in R. Sayyid Ahmad (ed.), Fathi al-Shqaqi: Rihlat al-Dam Alladhi Hazama al-Sayf: al-Amal al-Kamila lil-Shahid al-Duktur Fathi al-Shqaqi (Cairo: Markaz Yafa lil-Dirasat wal-Abhath, 1997), pp. 68–9. 30 ‘Khabar wa-Itibar’, al-Manar, 1 (19.4.1898), pp. 105–8. 31 ‘Hayat Umma Bada Mawtiha: Jamiyyat al-Yahud al-Sahyuniyya’, al-Manar, 4 (26.1.1902), pp. 801–9. In April 1914 Rida shared with his readers a text on the Zionist movement published half a year earlier in Jurji Zaydan’s al-Hilal, justifying the reprint as an instructive contribution to a prolific discussion that was taking place on Zionism. This was the first time that al-Manar offered a thorough analysis on the reasons for the rise of Zionism and on the activities of Herzl (who had not been mentioned by Rida before) and his successors. Focusing on the financial and educational activities of the Jews, in particular their revival of Hebrew culture and language, al-Hilal noted that ‘the reader may wonder why this [the Zionist] call succeeded in such a short time, but when informed about the objective and the means [applied by the Zionist] it will become clear’. Rida added only one comment to the lengthy reprint, exposing once again his adoration of what the Zionists had accomplished and his conviction that they set an example for the Arabs. Alluding to his lead-article from 1902, he wrote that anyone with a heart to feel with, and a brain to think with, will learn from the

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Jews how nations can revive after their death and regain their strength after their decline. ‘Al-Sihyawniyya’, al-Manar, 17 (25 April 1914), 385–90. 32 ‘Thawrat Filastin Asasuha wa-Nataijuha’, al-Manar, 30 (1.11.1929), pp. 385–94. 33 ‘al-Brughram al-Sahyuni al-Siyasi’, al-Manar, 17 (23.8.1914), pp. 697–708; the analysis of Ussishkin’s essay is on pages 707–8. 34 For example, in M. Imara, Fi Fiqh al-Sira ala al-Quds wa-Filastin (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2005), pp. 90–103. 35 M. S., ‘Yahudi Yumaththilu Misr fi Baris’, al-Nadhir 1:14 (28.8.1938), pp. 21–2. 36 ‘Al-Ahwal al-Sinaiyya wal-Ziraiyya’, al-Nadhir 1:6 (3.7.1938), pp. 19–20. 37 For this quote, see: El-Awaisi, The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1998), p. 29. 38 On the concept of the Islamist mainstream that a violent rebellion against an unjust Muslim ruler should ensue only if its success can be assured: Y. al-Qaradawi, Min Fiqh al-Dawla fi al-Islam (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 4th edition 2006 [1997]), pp. 125–6; Qutb, Waqiuna al-Muasir, pp. 452–63. 39 Mawqi al-Qaradawi, ‘Al-Qaradawi yataraasu masirat al-tandid bi-ightiyal alShaykh Ahmad Yasin’ (25.3.2004): www.qaradawi.net/news/59.html (accessed June 2012). 40 Umar al-Tilmisani, La Nakhafu al-Salam … wa-Lakin! (Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi wal-Nashr al-Islamiyya, 1992), pp. 20–5. 41 Al-Qaud, al-Sulh al-Aswad, pp. 128–9. 42 ‘Mumathil Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya Hamas fi Al-Urdun Muhammad Nazzal: al-Tarikh Lam Yusajjil Walaw Hala Wahida Tadhad Nazariyyat Hatmiyyat Zawal al-Ihtilal’, al-Sabil (19–25.5.98), p. 6. 43 ‘Al-Duktur Abd al-Sattar Qasim Ustadh al-Ulum al-Siyasiyya fi Jamiat alNajah: Al-Kiyan al-Sahyuni Yaftakiru ila al-Bud al-Jughrafi al-Daruri fi alMuwajahat al-Askariyya’, al-Sabil (19–25.5.98), pp. 7–8. 44 Al-Maqadma, Maalim fi al-Tariq ila Tahrir Filastin, pp. 99–106. 45 I. ‘A. al-Ubaydi, ‘Wallahi Ar’, al-Sabil, Part 2 (5–11.8.2008), p. 17. 46 ‘D. Farhan: Ittifaqiyyat al-Salam maa al-Adw Satusbihu Khabaran ala Waraq’, al-Sabil (19–25.5.98), p. 6. 47 ‘Al-Duktur Abd al-Sattar Qasim Ustadh al-Ulum al-Siyasiyya fi Jamiat al-Najah: Al-Kiyan al-Sahyuni Yaftakiru ila al-Bud al-Jughrafi al-Daruri fi ­al-Muwajahat al-Askariyya’, al-Sabil (19–25.5.98), pp. 7–8. 48 M. ‘A. al-Samman, ‘Istratijiyyat al-Dawa al-Islamiyya fi al-Duwal Ghayr alIslamiyya’, in: without an editor’s name: al-Aqalliyyat al-Muslima fi al-Alam: Zurufuha al-Muasira, Alamuha, wa-Amaluha (Riyadh: Sharikat al-Ubaykan lil-Tibaa wal-Nashr, n.d.), pp. 181–93. See also an opinion column by the journalist Muhammad Amir; his main point was that the Arabs would be able to liberate Palestine only if they relinquished the false path of pan-Arab nationalism and returned to Islam. ‘Herzl’, he wrote, ‘said in Basel that a Jewish State would be established within 50 years, and so it was’, see: M. Amir, ‘al-Ard Muqabil al-Salam wa-In La fal-Jihad’, al-Haqiqa (16.11.1991), p. 11.

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49 Al-Muharrir al-Thaqafi (culture editor), ‘Nahwa “Yad fa-Shim” Filastini!’, Filastin al-Muslima (May 2009), p. 53. 50 For a discussion on the development of this conception see: U. Shavit, ‘Should Muslims integrate into the West?’, Middle East Quarterly, 14:4 (2007), 13–21; ‘The wasati and salafi approaches to the religious law of Muslim minorities’, Islamic Law and Society, 20:4 (2012), 416–57. 51 H. M. Hassan, Wasail Muqawamat al-Ghazw al-Fikri lil-Alam al-Islami (Mecca: Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami, 1981), pp. 92–4. 52 Ibid., pp. 110–11. Similarly, two decades later the Palestinian historian Abd alFattah al-Awaisi called to learn from the contribution made by the Jewish lobby in England to the establishment of the State of Israel, and accordingly to activate the Arab–Islamic lobby in Britain ‘by all the legitimate means’ in order to shape history: A. A. al-Awaisi, ‘Dawr Baritaniya fi Tasis al-Dawla al-Yahudiyya 1840–1948’, Filastin al-Muslima (May 1998), pp. 22–8. 53 Hassan, Wasail Muqawamat al-Ghazw al-Fikri lil-Alam al-Islami, pp. 179–89. 54 M. al-Ghazali, Mustaqbal al-Islam Kharij Ardihi: Kayfa Nufakkiru Fihi (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1997), p. 5. 55 Ibid., p. 78. 56 Ibid., pp. 72–4. 57 Y. al-Qaradawi, Fi Fiqh al-Aqalliyyat al-Muslima (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2007 [2001]), p. 33. 58 Y. al-Qaradawi, ‘Duties of Muslims living in the West’ (7.5.2006): IslamOnline. net . 59 Y. al-Qaradawi, Min Fiqh al-Dawla fi al-Islam (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2001), p. 36; M. al-Ghazali, Azmat al-Shura fi al-Mujtamaat al-Arabiyya wal-Islamiyya (n.p., October 1990), p. 69. 60 Al-Ghazali, Azmat al-Shura, p. 31; Al-Qaradawi, Min Fiqh al-Dawla, pp. 137–8; also in his book al-Khasais al-Amma lil-Islam (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, August 1977), p. 39. 61 According to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in a shura system the people elect their leader, who cannot be imposed on them: Min Fiqh al-Dawla, p. 27; also: M. Imara, al-Islam wa-Huquq al-Insan: Darurat La Huquq (Damascus and Cairo: Markaz al-Ruya, Dar al-Islam, 2004–05 [1985]), pp. 60–1. 62 Al-Ghazali, Azmat al-Shura, pp. 35–6; Imara, al-Islam wa-Huquq al-Insan, pp. 19–34. 63 H. al-Turabi, Nazarat fi al-Fiqh al-Siyasi (Umm al-Fahm: Markaz al-Dirasat al-Muasira, 1997), pp. 45, 122; Imara, al-Islam wa-Huquq al-Insan, p. 61. 64 Al-Qaradawi, al-Khasais al-Amma, p. 87; H. al-Turabi, Nazarat fi al-Fiqh alSiyasi, pp. 43–4. 65 Imara, al-Islam wa-Huquq al-Insan, p. 61; al-Qaradawi, Min Fiqh al-Dawla, p.  14; al-Ghazali, Azmat al-Shura, pp. 42, 46. For analysis: U. Shavit, ‘Islamotopia: The Muslim Brotherhood’s idea of democracy’, Azure, 45 (Fall 2011), in Hebrew, 29–51; U. Shavit, ‘Is shura a Muslim form of democracy?’, Middle Eastern Studies, 46:3 (May 2010), 349–74. 66 Al-Ghazali, al-Ghazw al-Thaqafi Yamtaddu fi Faraghina, pp. 42–3.

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67 Al-Ghazali, Azmat al-Shura, pp. 35–6. 68 Ibid., p. 41. 69 Al-Ghazali, al-Ghazw al-Thaqafi Yamtaddu fi Faraghina, p. 41. 70 Ibid., p. 94. 71 Ibid., pp. 44–5. 72 Ibid., p. 94. 73 Al-Ghazali, Azmat al-Shura, p. 44. 74 See: M. Ghazali, ‘al-Ghazali: al-mara rais dawla’ (25.10.2007): www.alghazaly.org/index.php?id=110 (accessed June 2012); for similar ideas: A Madi and M. Jalal, ‘al-Shaykh Muhammad Ghazali: Fikr mutajaddid la yundibu abadan’ (n.d.): www.ghazaly.org/index.php?id=108 (accessed June 2012); also A. alSawyan, ‘Nazarat fi mudhakkirat al-mara al-Sahyuniyya al-rajul’ (13.5.2002): www.islamtoday.net/salman/artshow-45–958.htm (accessed June 2012). 75 Y. Al-Qaradawi, ‘al-Qaradawi yuhayyi Israil’ (6.2.2014): www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iNrQa1w_H8s (accessed June 2012). The subordination of Israeli leaders to the rule of law did not escape the Sudanese Hasan al-Turabi, the only Islamist intellectual to gain political clout during the 1990s (until he fell from grace in 2001). Noting that an international arrest warrant against the Sudanese President who became his rival, Umar al-Bashir, is not implemented, he wrote: ‘The prophets are held accountable for their deeds, but Arab leaders have it their own way. Have you seen an Arab leader held accountable for anything? We saw the leaders of the West held accountable, we saw the leaders of Israel held accountable, notwithstanding our complaints against them on other matters. Even the Khalifa stood trial in the past, but today he is above all.’ See: M. Ghulam, ‘alTurabi: Fi hadith hawla al-intikhabat wa-nataijiha wa-tadaiyatiha’ (23.4.2010): www.alsahafa.sd/details.php?articleid=5162 (accessed June 2012). 76 S. A. Sulayman, ‘Aqwal ahl al-ilm fi al-Qaradawi’ (n.d.): alqaradawi.maktoobblog.com 77 This is most likely a distortion of the verse: ‘On the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates”’ (Genesis, 15:18, The New King James Version, New York, American Bible Society, 1982). 78 R. al-Ghannushi, ‘al-Usuliyya al-Waraqa Allati Laiba biha Arafat’, Filastin al-Muslima (October 1993), pp. 44–5. For another discussion by the same author on Arab regimes as agents of the colonialist attack: R. al-Ghannouchi, ‘Secularism in the Arab Maghreb’, in A. Tamimi and J. L. Eposito (eds), Islam and Secularism in the Middle East (London: Hurst & Company, 2000), pp. 97–123. 79 ‘Al-Nahdat Hamadi al-Jibali yatarifu bi-Israil ka-dawla dimuqratiyya’ (22.6.2011): www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4uiOCc_FLk (accessed June 2012). 80 ‘Piratage du site Rachedghanouchi le leader de Nahdha’ (n.d.): iktib.blogspot. com. 81 Al-Islam al-Yawm, ‘Taammulat Arabiyya fi istiqalat Ulmirt wa-Mbeki’ (27.9.2008): www.islamtoday.net/bohooth/artshow-14-14233.htm (accessed June 2012).

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82 ‘Lan Takun Sittuna Aman Ukhra: al-Kiyan al-Sahyuni Yuani Azmat Bunyawiyya wa-Suqutuhu Yaqtaribu’, Filastin al-Muslima (July 2008), pp. 41–51. 83 A. al-Naimi, ‘Rahima Allah Shaykhana al-Qassam’ (20.10.2011): www. ikhwansyria.com/ar (accessed June 2012). 84 S. al-Falahat, ‘Shalit al-wahid bi-alf am al-alf bi-wahid’ (13.10.2011): www. ikhwanjo.com/#38318 (accessed June 2012).

3 Arab liberals between the struggle against despotism and the war against Zionism Arab liberals, Zionism and Israel

Rationalism and pragmatism have been the two cornerstones of Arab liberalism from its dawn to contemporary times. Arab liberals have defined themselves as the standard-bearers of empirical science, technological development and social progress; those who look toward the future instead of dwelling on the past, and pave a way that is not strewn with solacing traditions, inebriating fantasies and far-fetched wishes. However, rationality and pragmatism are not obvious concepts, especially not in the realm of political action. What may seem to one as reasonable concessions forced by the limitations of power, is for another blind enslavement. Almost since the inception of liberalism in the Arab world, Arab liberals have been divided between those welcoming Western powers as essential (albeit temporary) allies in the quest to form liberal societies, and those prioritizing liberation from Western domination, who emphasize that without such liberation freedom and democracy are meaningless. This gap in fundamental positions has also fashioned the liberals’ approach to Zionism and Israel. Whereas in the 1920s liberals were indifferent, neutral and even empathic toward Jewish settlement in Palestine, a general consensus rejecting Zionist plans emerged in the 1930s and was strengthened in the 1940s. Nevertheless, liberals endorsed conflicting policies that ranged from an uncompromising struggle for the rights of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine on the basis of pan-Arab solidarity and anti-imperialism to a preference for a compromise with Zionism, based on an acknowledgement of liberal dependence on Western support and the need of Arab societies to focus on domestic affairs. The Jewish victory in 1948 did not undermine liberal belief that the original sin of Jewish sovereignty is imperialism, a belief that persisted after the Six Day War. From the 1970s onward a consensus developed in Arab liberal thought that demanded Israel’s withdrawal from the lands it had conquered in 1967 and a solution to the refugee problem. However, liberals were divided between those who believe that

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the narrative of uncompromising rights should be abandoned in favour of accepting reality’s limitations and vigorously striving for peace and normalization, and those who believe that Arabs will regain their rights only by military might. Rooted in the thinking of the late 1940s and crystallized in the 1970s, a broad liberal agreement blamed the despotic nature of Arab regimes for their failures in the fight against Israel. Yet, the conclusion from this analysis remained contested. Liberals who prioritized democratization and civil liberties advocated for a compromise with Israel, based on their conviction that significant political reforms are dependent on ending the conflict. On the other hand, liberals who emphasized the need to be freed from Western domination demanded democratization, claiming that without it Arabs will not be strong enough enough to face Israel on equal terms. For the former, peace is necessary because without it there will be no democracy; for the latter, democracy is necessary because without it Arabs will stand no chance of reclaiming what has been taken from them. There were also liberals who did not choose between these perceptions but, rather, vacillated between them. The lack of a single, harmonious approach toward Israel was but one of many splits among Arab liberals. They were united over their basic demands for the future of Arab societies, but divided over their prioritizations and the different means of attaining their demands, hindering the creation of joint and stable frameworks. This chapter offers a chronological overview of the evolution of liberal thought with regard to the Zionist enterprise. It depicts the various perceptions of peace and normalization created within this thought and demonstrates the contradictory ways in which the Arab liberal struggle for freedom and democracy has been intertwined with the Israeli–Arab conflict.

Arab liberals vs Zionism: historical roots On 1 April 1925, Lord Balfour was the guest of honour at the inauguration of the Hebrew University at Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. It was a festive occasion for Jews in Mandatory Palestine. Schools took the day off, poets wrote laudatory poems and commercial firms published supportive advertisements. The Jewish National Council issued a ‘Proclamation for the Arab People’ stating that ‘this is a cultural celebration, a national holiday for us! The Hebrew College in Jerusalem is inaugurated. We wish this to be a general holiday for the entire country.’ The proclamation was addressed to the ‘brothers of the glori-

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ous Arab nation’ and promised that ‘the Jerusalem College’ would serve not only as a Jewish spiritual centre, but as ‘a source of creation for all the people of the Orient who are being revived due to the unifying power of science’. In the field of science, promised the proclamation, the two ancient–modern peoples – whose shared cultural work, imbued with peace and love, spanned over hundreds of years from Baghdad to Cordoba – would meet again. The Hebrew newspapers reported the widespread interest of the Arab world in the University. Among these reports was author Husni Abd al-Hadi’s opinion in the Haifa newspaper al-Karmil against the Arab strike initiated in protest against Lord Balfour’s visit. He claimed that the strike would not prevent the ‘Zionists from building their university, which will arm their sons against ours and secure their victory in the campaign of their life’. He defined the university as a ‘Zionist educational weapon’ and called on the Arabs to establish their own university. Another report depicted the journey to Palestine of Ahmad Lutfi alSayyid, the representative of the Egyptian government sent to attend and dignify the ceremony, despite the protest of ‘Palestinian propagandists’ in Cairo.1 The participation of al-Sayyid, the father of Egyptian liberalism, in a formative ceremony for the Zionist movement was a gesture of goodwill that will not be repeated again between the government of the largest Arab country and the Zionist enterprise. At that time al-Sayyid did not hold an official political position. A month prior to the ceremony he was nominated as the first President of the Egyptian University (today the Cairo University), regarded as a symbol of Egyptian Westernization. However, behind the scenes he remained a close acquaintance of King Fuad and a central figure in the Liberal Constitutionalist Party. The party, established in October 1922, split Egyptian liberalism between the Wafd, who demanded immediate full independence from Britain and the founding of a parliamentary democracy where the people are the de facto sovereign, and a faction that favoured a gradual progression toward independence and democracy. The latter were more willing to reach a compromise with Zionism, not because they viewed Zionist ambitions as moral or legitimate, but because they feared the British response, correctly estimated the power of the Zionist enterprise and sought to focus their political efforts exclusively on the domestic arena. Despite an invitation to speak at the ceremony, al-Sayyid refrained from doing so, explaining that he did not want his participation to be interpreted as Egyptian preference of the Zionists over the Arabs. To his Arab detractors, he responded that he represented education and not Egyptian politics. The Liberal Constitutionalist government did not

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stop at these words of appeasement. The Minister of the Interior, Ismail Sidqi, ordered the arrest of Palestinians who demonstrated in Cairo against al-Sayyid’s gesture and jeered Balfour as he was leaving Egypt for the ceremony.2 The Liberal Constitutionalists maintained their moderate position even when the tension in Palestine escalated. The 1929 riots caused tumult in Egyptian public opinion, yet the government did not support the Palestinians, and the Liberal Constitutionalists’ journal al-Siyasa even denounced the violence against the Jews and called upon the Palestinians to cooperate with the British Mandate and the Zionists.3 The editor-in-chief of al-Siyasa, Muhammad Hussein Haykal, called for the formation of a joint Jewish–Arab committee to reach an arrangement between the sides. A proposed solution for the conflict, published in the paper by historian Muhammad Abdallah Annan, suggested (somewhat mirroring the Jewish intellectual Ahad Haam, founder of cultural Zionism) that Jews should adopt a narrow interpretation of the idea of the ‘National Home’ and settle for its symbolic manifestation as a ‘Spiritual home’.4 In 1930 a delegation of Egyptian students visited Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, despite the protests of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and the Egyptian consulate in Jerusalem invited Zionist leaders to the King’s birthday celebrations.5 In the early 1930s the chasm within the liberal camp grew as new antiliberal political powers headed by the Muslim Brothers and the nationalist-militarist movement Misr al-Fatah (The Young Egypt Party) rose to prominence. In December 1931, the Wafd, sensitive to public opinion and serving in the opposition after a short spell at the helm, sent a representative to the General Islamic Conference convened in Jerusalem by Hajj Amin al-Husseini in an attempt to recruit pan-Islamic support for the Palestinian cause. Party-affiliated newspapers began dedicating regular pages to the Palestinian issue, supported the rights of Arabs over Palestine as exclusive, and demanded that Britain should curtail Jewish immigration to Palestine and revoke the Balfour Declaration.6 In June 1930, Ismail Sidqi became the prime minister following the dispersal of the Wafd government. In order to extinguish the flames, he issued a directive prohibiting the mention of ‘Palestine’ during Friday prayers and the collection of donations in mosques for its inhabitants.7 In May 1936, weeks after the outbreak of the Arab rebellion, the Wafd returned to power. Its Prime Minister, Mustafa al-Nahhas, declared that his country would not sit idly by in the light of what was transpiring in Palestine. To reinforce this sentiment, he gave a symbolic personal donation of forty Egyptian pounds to support the Palestinian struggle. In meetings with British representatives held between June and August of

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that year, he urged them to suspend Jewish immigration to Palestine and warned Britain that his government was sitting on a powder keg, whose ignition might result in violence against the Jews of Egypt. Following the publication of the Peel Commission’s conclusions in July 1937, which suggested for the first time the partition of the land into two states and was rejected by the Palestinians, al-Nahhas sent a telegram to Hajj Amin al-Husseini stating his determination to assist the Arabs in Palestine in defence of their rights, and another to the British government voicing his objection to Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. In a meeting with the British Ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, he protested that the Commission was demanding that the Arabs in Palestine should share their homeland with strangers.8 Nevertheless, despite the harsh rhetoric, the Wafd government refrained from direct involvement in the conflict and ensured that the protests remained under control, ordering newspapers editors to curtail criticism of Britain and limiting pro-­Palestinian propaganda in the mosques. At the end of 1937, taking advantage of the decline in public support for the Wafd, the King removed al-Nahhas. The Liberal Constitutionalist government that replaced them, under the leadership of Muhammad Mahmud, banned anti-British demonstrations and censored pro-­Palestinian leaflets.9 In private discussions Mahmud raised his concern that the conflict in Palestine would arouse pan-Arab and panIslamic tendencies. Mahmud sought for himself the role of mediator, acting as a moderate force in the Arab region. Following the collapse in March 1939 of the London Roundtable Conference – a British attempt to mediate between the Zionist and Palestinian sides – Mahmud met with Chaim Weizmann in Cairo. Weizmann recalled that at this meeting Mahmud offered future Egyptian–Jewish cooperation and expressed the hope that Egypt could serve as a ‘bridge’ between Arabs and Jews. In May 1939 Britain published a White Paper, or a policy document, in which, faced with the looming possibility of a world war and desperate for Arab support, it repealed its commitment to forming a national Jewish home. The move did not, however, satisfy the Palestinian demand for a complete cessation of Jewish immigration. Mahmud tried to persuade the Palestinians to accept the White Paper as the basis of a solution to the conflict with the Jews.10 One of the prominent liberal voices rejecting Zionism was that of Taha Hussein, who was close to the Wafd although he did not hold an official political role until 1950. Hussein rejected the Zionist narrative of an ancient historical Jewish right over the land of Israel, and defined Zionism as a colonialist ‘toy’ that impeded the objective of Arab independence and trampled over their natural national rights.11 In an

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interview in 1945 he said that Palestine was an Arab country that should become an independent Arab state and a member of the Arab League, and that any other solution would constitute an act of thievery that Arab governments and peoples should fight wholeheartedly.12 When the decisive moment over the future of Palestine approached, heated public debate, an economic crisis and strikes, the growth of the Muslim Brothers’ power, the militaristic tendencies of King Faruq and his concern that Amir Abdallah of Transjordan would gain in power at his expense, all pointed to war. The liberal parties, with all their factions, again became the moderate force in Egypt, searching for compromise. Ismail Sidqi, who returned to the prime minister’s seat as the leader of the People’s Party, met in 1946 with Eliyahu Sasson, head of the Arab Department of the Jewish Agency, sent on behalf of Moshe Sharett, the head of the Political Department of the Agency. They discussed the groundwork for a Jewish–Egyptian agreement, according to which the Zionist movement would use its influence over the British to exert pressure for full Egyptian sovereignty over Egypt, in return for Egyptian support for the partition of Palestine.13 After the Partition Plan was accepted in the United Nations on 29 November 1947, Sidqi favoured Egypt’s adoption of it. He believed that waging a war against Israel would convince Britain that Egypt should not be granted full independence, and feared a futile adventure and a waste of resources that should be diverted toward domestic affairs. Others were less adamant, but like Sidqi lacked any real zeal for war. Mahmud al-Nuqrashi, the leader of the Sadist party that was formed in 1937 by Wafd dissidents loyal to King Faruq, inherited Sidqi as prime minister in September 1946. Following its formation, his government opposed the Partition Plan. Nevertheless, it warned that the Egyptian army was unprepared for battle, called for a diplomatic solution and refrained from beating the war drums. However, in the final vote in the Upper House of Parliament on 12 May 1948, Sidqi remained the sole voice opposing a declaration of war against Israel.14 The vote ended three decades of liberal debate over the appropriate treatment of the Zionist enterprise. It led to a resounding Egyptian defeat that in turn terminated the Egyptian experiment with liberalism. The Syrian liberal approach to the Zionist enterprise was characterized by a similar vacillation between moderation and struggle, splitting into two the National Bloc (al-Kutla al-Wataniyya), the main political power prior to Syrian independence that ruled the country between 1936 and 1939, and 1943 and 1946.15 From the 1920s, two contrasting trends existed within the party: the compromising ‘Syria First’ approach, led by Jamil Mardam, focused on obtaining independence from France

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even at the price of forsaking, albeit temporarily, the notion of ‘Greater Syria’ and accepting a compromise with the Zionist movement; the other, pan-Arab, approach actively supported the Palestinian struggle against Zionism.16 During the 1929 riots, the National Bloc restrained pro-Palestinian or anti-British sentiments that might dissuade Britain from assisting it with its ambitions for independence or that might provide France with a pretext to oppress the party. At the time of the Arab Revolt, the pragmatic faction led by Mardam, who became prime minister in 1936, continued to turn a cold shoulder to the Palestinian struggle because of its fear that the French–Syrian Agreement, designed to allow Syria independence within three years, would fail to gain final French approval or much-needed British support.17 Nonetheless, those within the party who opposed the pragmatic approach did not sit by idly. At times they undermined Mardam by smuggling weapons and fighters in support of the Palestinian struggle, spreading anti-British and anti-Zionist propaganda, harbouring Palestinian leaders, holding strikes and solidarity demonstrations and boycotting Jewish merchandise.18 Between 1936 and 1939, Mardam and party co-members Fakhri alBarudi and Shukri al-Quwatli, who was the leader of the party’s panArab faction and a hard-liner in relation to Zionism, met with Zionist representatives, including Chaim Weizmann and Eliyahu Eilat from the Political Department of the Jewish Agency. The Zionist representatives offered to promote French recognition of Syrian independence in exchange for Syrian efforts to calm the Palestinian uprising. Mardam was quoted as saying in one of the meetings that the two nations – Arab and Jewish – had a mutual interest in peace.19 Al-Quwatli, for his part, ardently rejected any arrangement that would concede Palestine to Jewish sovereignty, but he did not object to Jewish autonomy over a small portion of the land as part of a large Arab federation.20 France’s refusal to ratify the independence agreement with Syria terminated the talks with Zionist leaders, and the willingness to compromise was replaced by a general and comprehensive commitment to a struggle against the Zionist enterprise. Al-Quwatli, who assumed leadership over the party after the resignation of Mardam in 1939 and was elected President of Syria in 1943, drove the unwavering position against the fulfilment of the national ambitions of the Jewish people in Palestine. His pan-Arab and anti-Zionist stance did not solely derive from identification with the Palestinian cause, but also from domestic and regional issues. These issues included diverting criticism from domestic Syrian social and economic problems toward foreign affairs; forming a unified Arab front against the territorial expansionist ambitions of the Hashemite Kingdom; and striking alliances that guaranteed

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support of Syria in the case of a Zionist offensive attack. In 1947 alQuwatli and Mardam formed The National Party (al-Hizb al-Watani) that split from the National Bloc. Under their leadership, the former as President and the latter as prime minister, Syria not only rejected unconditionally the UN Partition Plan, but also smuggled weapons and irregular units of volunteers into Palestine and was the first Arab country to position troops on its borders.21 This militarism led to a war that ended in a stunning defeat, which in turn led to the 1949 military coup led by General Husni al-Zaim, after which Syrian parliamentarism recovered for only a short period in the 1950s. Defeats breed soul searching, yet different souls might discover different things. The pragmatic liberals who called for moderation analysed the results of the war as a justification for their cautiousness, while militaristic liberals interpreted it as proof of the necessity for an overhaul of the system, as this round of fighting was only the first, and a second, more successful one, was bound to follow. During the apex of pan-Arabism neither of these voices carried much clout. From the early 1950s to the late 1960s, liberals who publicly supported an arrangement with Israel were scarce, while liberals advocating for another campaign against Israel became a secondary voice within the broader agreement of both radical and conservative regimes. To return to Egypt, after the war, Taha Hussein adhered to an uncompromising stance against Zionism. He was among the liberals who supported the 1952 Free Officers Revolution both due to their despair at the failures of the constitutional monarchy and due to their hope that the military regime would usher in a transition period that would enable the rise of a stronger liberal Egypt.22 In an op-ed in the revolutionary newspaper al-Jumhuriyya, he described Israel as an entity imposed by the West contrary to the rules of history and that tramples on the rights of Arabs.23 In June 1956 he extolled the book of the Palestinian thinker Amid al-Imam, who argued that the conflict with Israel was existential and could not end peacefully, rather, only in the extinction of one or the other, the Jewish state or the Arab countries.24 Upon reading and rereading the book Hussein was convinced that ‘peace with the usurpers is a crime as long as their usurpation persists’, and ‘accepting the usurpation by Israel and its helpers in Palestine constitutes being an accomplice to the crime’. Hussein depicted Israel as an expansionist country that inherently opposes peace with the Arabs, and adopted Imam’s portrayal of the Zionists as conspirators of deceit and fraud, who purchase knowledge, consciences and governments with money and cynically utilize the Holocaust and inflate its results in order to promote their objectives.25 After the 1967 defeat, Hussein promoted the Nasserist argument that

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at first rejected any agreement with Israel; he argued that Israel did not wish to live within secure borders but, rather, preferred to continue its expansionist endeavours.26 Another liberal voice that called for an additional round of fighting anchored his call in the liberal idea itself. Constantine Zurayq (1909– 2000), a Syrian Greek-Orthodox historian who had written his doctoral dissertation at Princeton University, was one of the main ideologists of liberal Arab Nationalism during the 1940s and 1950s, serving between 1946 and 1947 as the Syrian envoy to Washington, DC and a member of its UN delegation. In a book he published in August 1948 about the lessons of the war, he coined the term nakba to describe the Arab defeat. He was also the first to connect the Arab democratic crisis to the way Arabs performed in the battlefield against the Zionists. His book’s point of departure (which Zurayq had expressed already after the Partition Plan was approved in the United Nations) was that Israel had no historical legitimacy for a number of reasons. The first was that the Jews ruled Palestine hundreds of years ago, only for a short period of time, and without control over the coastal region. Second, the connection between the Jews who emigrated from Europe and the Jews who historically lived in Palestine was religious, rather than hereditary, and a common religion does not suffice for the creation of a people or the forming of a nation. Third, acknowledging the Jewish historical right over Palestine was an absurd precedent that could theoretically lead to recognizing Arab rights in Spain, Italian rights in England and Native American rights in the United States. And fourth, the claim that Palestine was the Promised Land did not coincide with the secular nature of the Zionist movement, therefore constituting a cynical use of religion for political purposes. According to Zurayq, even from a legal standpoint, Israel was illegitimate. Firstly, the British did not have the right to promise the Jews a land in the Balfour Declaration, as it was not their land to give and they had not consulted the original inhabitants. Secondly, the United Nations did not have the mandate to partition the land without allowing its inhabitants to democratically decide on their own fate. Thirdly, the Jews, under British patronage, had purchased lands from the Arabs illegally. Lastly, the Arabs should not pay with their sovereignty for the crimes committed by European nations during the Holocaust.27 Zurayq determined that the amalgamation of pan-Arab unity and the forming of liberal societies was the solution for the inner-Arab crisis and the external Zionist threat. On the one hand, Arab countries should merge their armies and economies, coordinate their policies and formulate their goals and messages together. On the other hand, they must grant political, social and intellectual liberties, separate religion

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and state, reform the administration, propagate knowledge and culture, adopt sciences and technologies and acquire the toolkit of modern civilization. He wrote that the ‘inner jihad to establish a healthy Arab entity’ was a precondition to the success of the ‘outward jihad’ against Israel and the solving of the Palestinian problem.28 In August 1967, two decades after the publication of his first book about the nakba, Zurayq published another book, Rethinking the Nakba, which was again among the first to analyse the reasons for the defeat, this time in the Six Day War. It identified the same problem as in 1948; the restriction of political liberty in Arab countries created a divide between the Arab rulers and their people, suppressing the latter’s spirit of devotion that existed within them.29 He suggested that the nature of the cultures and regimes that would conduct the next round of fighting against Israel would determine its results.30

The Israeli–Egyptian peace and the rejuvenation of pragmatic liberalism While the 1967 defeat signalled the decline of pan-Arabism, Nasser still remained a charismatic leader supported by the love of the masses. As discussed in Chapter 1, although Egypt was positioned alongside its Arab counterparts in opposing peace, negotiations and recognition of Israel, Nasser’s stance after the defeat was ambivalent, leaving room for speculation that the goal of his regime, at least in the short term, was not another round of fighting aimed at eliminating Israel but, rather, diplomatic negotiations resulting in the enemy’s withdrawal from the lands it had occupied in June 1967. From May 1969 Nasser sanctioned on-going communications between Ahmad Hamrush, a left-wing ex-officer who served as the editor of the Ruz al-Yusuf magazine, and Israeli public officials. At the height of these meetings Harmush met with the President of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann, who understood that Nasser was interested in meeting with him. When this information was leaked to the Israeli press, it caused a stir in public opinion and fury in Golda Meir.31 Parallel to unofficial interactions, Egyptian policy officially shifted when Nasser accepted American Secretary of State William Rogers’s second plan to stop the war of attrition and resolve the conflict on the basis of the UN Security Council’s resolution 242. However, Egypt did not regard the proposal’s acceptance as proof of readiness to sign a peace treaty with Israel, nor as an obligation to refrain from ending the conflict militarily. Sadat, who succeeded Nasser in September 1970, continued

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the policy of sending hesitant non-committal diplomatic feelers in support of an arrangement, along with promises that Egypt would not allow a prolonged condition of ‘no peace and no war’ and preparations of the Egyptian army for another round of hostilities. This policy did not lead to a diplomatic breakthrough, and in 1972 a renewed round of warfare between Egypt and Israel seemed a viable possibility. At this point, the pragmatic liberal voice reawakened and delivered a message that had been absent from the Egyptian discourse during the pinnacle of Nasser’s regime: the question was not whether virtue and justice were on the side of the Arabs but, rather, what would be the price of war and were its goals attainable? Writer and playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987) and the greatest modern Arab novelist, Najib Mahfuz (1911–2006), trumpeted this question. In 1972, alHakim distributed a manifesto among his acquaintances, The Return of Consciousness (Awdat al-Way), that became public only in 1974. He lamented the intellectual degeneration that had been cast over Egypt’s citizens and educated public under Nasser’s authoritarian rule, and the billions of Egyptian lira wasted on wars between 1956 and 1967. He warned that a change was needed: ‘Five whole years have passed since the Egyptian defeat, five years of stagnation with neither war nor peace, spending on its broken army amounts of money […] that could fund the building of the Aswan Dam twice […] what is this madness? What will history say about what transpired during the revolutionary period?’32 In April 1972, Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi, the young and combative ruler of Libya, visited al-Ahram’s headquarters. He was enraged when he met with a group of writers, including al-Hakim and Mahfuz, who spoke of negotiating with Israel. Mahfuz said that since a war was not feasible, Egypt should opt for negotiations, as the damage of the ‘no peace and no war’ limbo was even greater, to which al-Qadhafi responded ‘we will forgive you for what you said. The inaction of the Arabs is indeed enough to elicit such defeatist ideas!’33 In January 1973 al-Hakim presented Sadat with a petition signed by Egyptian writers and thinkers, including Mahfuz. The petition called on the President to allow a public debate that would enable Egyptians to participate in the determination of their own fate. It hinted at the notion that a military campaign by an undemocratic society was destined to fail, a notion that would become seminal to the writing of Egyptian liberals in the years to come. The petition stated that Egypt’s citizens and youth felt that their country’s war ambitions were at a dead end, and that the dire financial state, the poor public services and any other defects and malfunctions were put on hold, due to the lingering threat of war. The solution lay in bringing the actual facts to the Egyptian people for a free

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public debate regarding the path to Egyptian salvation. Instead of the Egyptian regime forming a position, transforming it into a slogan and then forcing it upon its people, it should place the burden on the nation and form its policy only after hearing the positions of ‘Free Egypt’.34 When the war of October 1973 began, Mahfuz was convinced that it would end in defeat within days and Israeli soldiers would be roaming the streets of Cairo.35 Indeed, the war did not end in Egyptian victory, yet Sadat gained a moral victory that made it easier for him – and convinced Israel – to pursue the option of peace more vigorously. In September 1975 the Sinai Interim Agreement was signed between the two countries. Even though it expressly emphasized that it was not ‘a finite peace agreement’, it was the first time that Egypt and Israel had committed to resolving ‘the conflict between them and in the Middle East not by military force, but through peaceful means’, and declared that it was a ‘significant step toward a just and sustainable peace’.36 Mahfuz, who two months after the war had wished the ‘victory’ would become a milestone in the transformation of Egypt into a ‘new Europe’ that upholds freedom of thought,37 supported the pragmatic policy of Sadat wholeheartedly. In an interview given to Kuwaiti newspaper alQabas in January 1976 he praised Sadat’s ‘genius’ in tricking Israel in the war and being able to approach peace from a position of strength. He maintained that peace between Israel and Arab countries would guarantee prosperity and cultural resurrection, whereas war would consume the oil rents, exhaust Arab societies and benefit imperialism. Mahfuz proposed learning from the bitter experience of Carthage that for hundreds of years had fought the Roman Empire, only to be destroyed at the end, and favouring the example of Germany, which had utilized all of its resources to rehabilitate itself after the Second World War, until it once again became a European power. ‘If we can achieve true peace by sacrificing some of the territories that were originally ours’, he said, ‘we should do so in order to ensure the success of the agreement and to safeguard the stability of the peace. I believe peace is dear to us and to our future and is preferable to land, as we cannot build our civilization under any other condition than peace.’38 Mahfuz’s political stance was also manifested in his literary work. In his novel Mirrors, one of the female characters has the insight that cultural backwardness is Egypt’s main concern and that the continued war with Israel does not allow Arabs to overcome it: ‘We are plagued by degeneration, which is our true enemy and not Israel. Israel is our enemy and threatens us only because as a result of Israel our backwardness might endure forever.’39 After Sadat announced his peace initiative, Mahfuz published a short story in which the protagonist, a metaphor for

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Sadat, leaves his ‘friends’, representing the Arabs, in order to get to the ‘city lights’, which manifest civilization. The story, appearing in Uktubir magazine in March 1978, embodied the moral that Arab solidarity harmed Egypt.40 Sadat’s actions found support also among some in the Egyptian Left, who argued for the acceptance of the existence of Israel and reaching a compromise with it, at the very least in the short term.41 Nevertheless, the strategic choice of the peaceful path was not founded on national consensus. It was the decision of a leader who was not democratically elected, and who had decided to ally his country with the United States and sever its obligation to inter-Arab agreements. When this choice led in 1977 to the historic visit to Jerusalem and to negotiations resulting in the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, inner-Egyptian resistance grew and the republic was ostracized in the Arab world. At that point the fight for the legitimacy of peace became critical, and Mahfuz and al-Hakim enlisted to it unconditionally. Mahfuz explained his support by expressing the hope that ending the conflict would allow the Arabs to focus on domestic affairs and develop their culture, rather than spending money on weapons.42 Al-Hakim, who approved of the translation of his works into Hebrew and even donated a symbolic sum of 300 dollars from his private pocket to the establishment of an Arab–Israeli society for the promotion of cultural coexistence,43 also defended Sadat’s choice to negotiate with Israel, stating that his country was required to worry only about its own ­interests. In an article titled ‘The Neutrality’ he explained: Egypt will not find a safe haven and its hungry will not be satiated, save for one path: a path that will enable it to utilize its funds to feed the hungry and the poor, to invest efforts in promoting the underdeveloped, and to focus on the development of the mind and soul in an atmosphere of freedom, security and serenity. Those will not be attained as long as Egypt’s capital and efforts are exhausted because of foreign and international problems and considerations, and because of personal domestic greed that is disconnected from the needs of the people. What is therefore the path to tranquility and calmness and the satiating of physical and spiritual hunger: this path is neutrality.44

Most Egyptian writers and intellectuals utterly rejected Sadat’s steps and opposed normalization with Israel. Mahfuz and al-Hakim were criticized that they had not shown courage, but loyalty and flattery to a tyrant who made his decisions alone. Mahfuz answered – not without merit – that he had supported peace even before Sadat made it his strategic choice.45 Despite the criticism, and even after Sadat’s assassination,

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the outbreak of the Lebanon War and the expansion of Israel’s settlement policy under the second Begin government, he and al-Hakim remained loyal to their pro-peace and pro-personal-level normalization positions, albeit accepting the linkage created by the Egyptian regime between solving the Palestinian problem and the promotion of statelevel normalization with Israel.46 In 1994 an assassination attempt on Mahfuz by a young Islamist failed; the immediate cause of the attack was not his support for peace. The faint voices of Egyptian liberals supporting Sadat’s promotion of peace did not spill over to other Arab societies. Liberals outside Egypt did not perceive Sadat’s actions as a potential historic turning point that necessitated a renewed paradigm of the conflict. The fate of Palestinian cardiologist Dr Isam Sartawi (1936–83), the Fatah liaison with Israeli peace movements, demonstrated the dangers of taking a favourable position on Israeli-Egyptian peace outside of Egypt. In the mid-1970s Sartawi came to the conclusion that the PLO should adopt a pro-American stance and acknowledge the state of Israel, in exchange for American support for the founding of a Palestinian state, which he envisioned as a liberal democracy. Contrary to the PLO’s position, he supported the Sadat peace initiative and in the mid-1980s considered launching an independent Palestinian peace movement. On 10 April 1983 he was assassinated during the Socialist International Congress in Lisbon.47 The organization of Abu-Nidal took responsibility for the assassination.

The end of the Cold War and the rise of a liberal ‘peace camp’ From the early 1990s a handful of Arab liberal thinkers, especially in Egypt but also outside, started to publish works that favoured promoting peace and broadening the normalization between Israel and its neighbours. These works, rooted in pragmatic political reasoning, were composed in the context of two international developments: the United States becoming the sole superpower, and the launching of direct negotiations between Israel, Arab states and the Palestinian national movement. The liberal authors, a vanguard that did not enjoy any real political clout, emphasized the need to acknowledge the power limitations of Arab societies and identified comprehensive peace as a prerequisite for developing democracy and liberty in Arab societies and achieving economic prosperity. Various attempts to institutionalize their call did not succeed and its public influence remained diminutive. Among its spokespeople, some supported the Sadat initiative from the

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very beginning, while others opposed it but changed their minds in the face of dramatic historic upheavals that did not favour the Arab side. The liberal ‘peace camp’ that appeared in the 1990s undermined a few conventions in the Arab discourse. Its members openly criticized the Arab side of the negotiations (in addition to criticism of the Israeli side) and called on it to increase its efforts in order to achieve an agreement. They demanded that cultural normalization with Israel should be expanded regardless of the progress made in on-going negotiations, based on their belief that peace would prevail and carry significant benefits only if it were based on popular public support. They also did not hesitate to question myths and perceptions that have dominated the Arab discourse, such as the analogy of Israel to the Crusaders, or the portrayal of the Palestinians as completely innocent victims of what transpired in 1948. The writings of pro-peace liberals demonstrated greater empathy toward Jewish history and a distinct readiness to accept the existence of a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East. Yet this did not represent a shift from the historical stance that disapproves of the Zionist enterprise, or a renunciation of the inalienable demand that Israel should withdraw from all the territories it occupied in 1967. The two main arguments propagated by the ‘peace camp’ liberals were pragmatic and related to their understanding of the international arena and the development of democracy. Firstly, it was impossible to defeat Israel on the battlefield, especially in a world where Arabs had lost Soviet support, the United States was an uncontested superpower and Arab states such as Syria had accepted (the once-rejected) principle of ‘land for peace’. Secondly, a state of war or instability was a useful weapon for unelected regimes to guarantee their survival, and therefore without peace there would be no democracy. The championing of peace was rooted in ‘peace camp’ liberals’ assessment of the international balance of power and domestic processes within Arab societies rather than in a shift in their normative approach to Zionism. Thus, the failures of the diplomatic processes since the 1990s and the partial responsibility of Israel in those failures did not undermine the basic position of those pro-peace liberals, even if they impeded their fervour and narrowed their space to operate. Jordanian liberal exile Shakir al-Nablusi had marked pragmatic support for peace and normalization with Israel as two of the twentyfive characteristics common to all members of the ‘new generation’ of Arab liberals which had risen in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. He observed that all liberals of his generation shared the realization that ‘due to the inequality in the militaristic, scientific, economic and mental balance of power’ between Israel and the Arabs,

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and especially with the Palestinians, there is no possible solution for the conflict other than negotiations. Moreover, peace agreements between countries require political and cultural normalization, because when the people of a country are not a part of them the agreements are ‘a waste of time’.48 However, as we shall demonstrate in the remainder of the chapter, not all of the ‘neo-liberals’ are members of the ‘peace camp’, as some have rejected these ideas wholeheartedly, while others have opted for a f­ unctional approach that varies in accordance with the circumstances. Amin al-Mahdi is one of the distinct intellectuals of the post-Cold War world who wrote passionately on the affinity between the futures of peace and democracy. Born in 1948 and an engineer by profession, alMahdi was a Nasserist in his youth. He married a Palestinian woman in Cairo, spent the last years of the 1970s in Beirut and returned to Egypt in the early 1980s. In the mid-1990s he befriended some Israeli peace activists and intellectuals and his publishing house, al-Dar al-Arabiyya lil-Nashr, translated Hebrew literary works into Arabic. He received the lion’s share of his publicity in the late 1990s from appearances on al-Jazeera, among his other endeavours, where he made a cogent argument for peace. The Other Opinion, his crucial essay on the question of relations with Israel, was originally published in Arabic, under the title The Arab-Israeli conflict: The Crisis of Democracy and Peace, in 1999, during the twilight of Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, and was translated into Hebrew in 2001.49 The peace envisioned by al-Mahdi consists of a recognition of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, establishment of their state and the return of the refugees, as well as of a recognition of the right of the Arabs ‘to reclaim their occupied territories’.50 Yet the details of the agreement are a secondary topic in the book, as al-Mahdi’s focus is the devastating effect of the conflict on the prospects for the rehabilitation of liberalism in the Arab world. He calls for the salvaging of the diplomatic process because of his belief that Arab societies will not ameliorate their dire position without deep-seated political reform, and that such reform is impossible so long as the hostilities between Israel and the Arabs continue. The Other Opinion describes an unbreakable bond between tyranny and war, and democracy and peace. This opinion is presented as an antithesis to the hegemonic ‘one opinion’ that supports a military resolution to the conflict and will not accept Israel as part of the region. According to al-Mahdi, this hegemonic opinion prevails because it serves the interests of the undemocratic forces that rule Egypt and the Arab world. War is a friend of the unelected regime because it allows

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it to marginalize any other issue, unify society and perpetuate political oppression, despite its failures and defeats. Peace, on the other hand, whether it originates from victory or defeat, generates an opportunity to ‘incorporate changes into societal values, achieve pluralism that deviates from the general consensus, and develop critical thinking and new forms of knowledge’. Throughout most of the latter half of the twentieth century, mobilization under slogans of the struggle against Israel caused Egyptian society to lose its ability to take any form of initiative. Nevertheless, the Egyptian regime’s decision – a far-too-belated decision in al-Mahdi’s mind – to opt for peace was not due to the assimilation of a peace discourse but, rather, because of circumstances that compelled the regime to substitute the declaration of war with a declaration of an imagined victory. It was made by an unelected regime that based its legitimacy on war. Therefore, the regime encountered difficulties in understanding the diligence required to create peace between peoples, and the result was a handicapped and vague peace agreement the intentions of which were ambiguous. Peace, which in the true sense of the word means peace between peoples, can only be a democratic peace based on honesty.51 In his book, al-Mahdi attacked the false rhetoric of Arab leaders who did not acknowledge their defeats by Israel, and instead hid behind fallacious expressions propagated by obedient propaganda mechanisms, harming their actual political and strategic capabilities. As demonstrated in Chapter 1, Islamist thinkers are quick to poignantly explain the defeats against Israel because they hold regimes that repudiated Islam as responsible for those defeats. As opposed to these views, for al-Mahdi the acknowledgement of the defeat is welcomed because the historical experience teaches that such acknowledgement constitutes the first domino on the path to fulfilment of the liberal vision. Germany and Japan signing documents of complete and utter surrender was the beginning of a change of values, perceptions and means that heralded the renaissance of their peoples; the defeat experienced by Greece in the struggle over Cyprus elicited an end to the Officers’ Regime and enabled Greece’s transformation into a respectable member of the European Union (this was written by al-Mahdi in the late 1990s); and defeat in the Falklands War signified the end of the Argentinean junta. Because al-Mahdi holds the Arab position, in terms of free thought and scientific research, to be worse than that of the Japanese, German, Greeks and Argentinians at the time when they respectively acknowledged their defeats, the internalization of the fact that Israel has won and the Arabs have lost becomes all the more important to him, as without it there cannot be reforms and rehabilitation.52 Democratization in and of

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itself will represent the expunging of the defeat, as the gap in modernity between Israel and the Arab world constitutes the ‘essential core of the struggle, and is the true arena in which one should keep the score of who is winning and who is losing’.53 According to al-Mahdi, the cold nature of the peace between Israel and Egypt is the result of the undemocratic nature of a regime that is reluctant to afford peace any real substance. The regime perceived normalization as a political card and not as a positive development for the future of the two peoples, thus transforming it into a derogatory term directed at the supporters of the ‘other opinion’ who tried to promote peace with Israel culturally, economically and scientifically. Al-Mahdi defends normalization with two pragmatic arguments; firstly, cultural, economic and military relations between the countries already existed, and on a larger scale than was commonly perceived. Secondly, ostracizing the Egyptians from Israeli culture and science, particularly by not implementing the peace treaty’s clause to build an Egyptian academic centre in Israel (as opposed to Israel, who established one in Cairo and as a result, according to al-Mahdi, has gained intimate familiarity with Arab culture) has given Israelis a one-sided advantage.54 In an ironic twist of Islamist rhetoric, al-Mahdi maintains that a ‘self’ is not formed through the elimination of the ‘other’. On the contrary, a ‘self’ cannot exist without the ‘other’, and thus when it rejects the ‘other’, it is rejecting itself. Arab demonization of the Jew has caused delusions, dissociative personality disorder and isolation and, as a result, defeat and ruin. Acknowledging the Holocaust does not entail ignoring the iniquity the Palestinians have suffered or the racist Zionist approaches towards them; to deny it is the real equivalent of rejecting the ‘self’. Much like Jews acknowledge crimes they have committed against Arabs, such as the massacre of Deir Yasin, Arabs should also accept their own crimes, such as the murder of almost 250 inhabitants of the Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, many of whom were women and children [the actual number of those massacred was 127].55 This form of recognition is necessary in order to establish a just, comprehensive and democratic peace between the Arabs and Israel. As the essence of the conflict is not only geographical but also historical and cultural, it cannot be resolved without developing empathy for the pain of the enemy and the creation of entrenched common denominators.56 Al-Mahdi’s analysis exposes a tragic paradox: the democratization of the Arab world requires peaceful relations with Israel, yet peaceful relations require democratization. How, then, will one or the other come to fruition? His answer is to establish a peace movement in Arab societies that will cooperate with the Israeli peace camp in warming hearts on

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both sides so that a meaningful peace can be established based on the assumption that ‘peace is too important to be left in the hands of governments’.57 This perception convinced al-Mahdi to support, on principle, the ‘Copenhagen Declaration’, a short-lived initiative by Egyptian, Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli peace activists who, during a deadlock in Israeli-Palestinian and the Israeli-Syrian negotiations, on 30 January 1997 established an ‘International Coalition for Arab–Israeli Peace’. They sought to garner public opinion in the Arab world and in Israel for the resolution of the conflict based on the ‘land for peace’ formula and in accordance with UN Resolutions 242 and 338.58 The ‘Copenhagen Declaration’ established a precedent: for the first time Arab public personas had formed a movement somewhat equatable to the Israeli peace movements. However, the experiment was short lived and did not have its desired impact, attesting to the divisions within the Arab peace camp, small as it was. Al-Mahdi did not spare his criticism, lamenting that the preparatory work on the Egyptian side had been concentrated in the al-Ahram Center and that peace activists (such as himself) had not been welcomed. He hinted that the regime had directed the activities of the participants, and that the initiative thus did not constitute a ­breakthrough from the non-democratic peace to a democratic one.59 The Copenhagen Declaration and its weaknesses were one of al-­ Mahdi’s motivations for publishing The Other Opinion, which concluded with a unique proposal to form the ‘Democratic Peace Parliament of the Middle East’, a body that would promote peace between the peoples on a popular basis. The parliament was designed to be impervious to any institutional control, thus serving as a moral, political and cultural force to reduce the contrast between the Arab and Israeli parties, to promote dialogue and accord between peace supporters on both sides, to lay the groundwork for potential cooperation, to thwart attempts to renege on the fulfilment of agreements, to neutralize terror and extremism in all its forms and to enable the integration of Israel into the region through openness and the sharing of interests. Among other suggestions was that the parliament should publish a yearly ‘white list’ celebrating those who excelled in peace-promoting activity, and a ‘black list’ condoning those who acted against it.60 Much like many other ideas to promote peace, this suggestion did not materialize. Another distinct player in the amalgamation of liberalism and peace is the author and playwright Ali Salim. Salim (1936–2015), who lost his brother in the 1967 war, was one of the first supporters of the Sadat initiative. In 1994, following the signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO, he embarked on a private journey to Israel and later depicted his experiences there in a book. Despite the failure

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of the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process and the severe criticism he himself encountered in Egypt, Salim remained a prominent activist for peace and normalization. In 2005, the Ben-Gurion University in Israel decided to award him an honorary doctorate, but the Mubarak regime prevented him from attending the ceremony. To Salim, there is an unbreakable bond between peace and democracy and anyone who speaks about ‘freedom, about democracy, about development, about human and civil rights, and about the unity and security of the state, without believing in peace, is leading you astray’.61 As peace walks hand in hand with democracy, the lack of the former leads to the absence of the latter. For that reason, anti-democratic forces in Arab countries are hostile to peace with Israel; authoritarian regimes perceive the active state of hostility, or at the very least the mental state, as a guaranteed justification for dismissing the rights and liberties of their peoples, as well as a distraction from their real problems – poverty, ignorance and sickness.62 For their part, Islamist forces know that a peaceful reality will undermine their image as the ‘protectors of the sanctity of Islam’, will increase economic welfare and will eventually prevent them from achieving their goal of attaining power.63 In the book that he published on his experiences in Israel and the West Bank, Salim called to abandon the obsession with history and with narratives for the benefit of a peaceful present and future. ‘I believe only in those parts [of history] that make me live with you in peaceful co-existence’, he explained in one of his dialogues with an Israeli Jew. When visiting a holy place in Jericho whose name slipped his mind, he commented, ‘All of history can go to hell with all of its places and locations. There is no place on earth more important than the human being.’64 Salim demonstrated consistent, vocal and practical support of normalization with Israel. His position was based on the belief that ‘normal relations are not the essence of peace, but peace itself’, and without them peace is likened to a bridge with unstable foundations that might collapse at any moment.65 Alongside his numerous visits to Israel and the widespread connections he made with Israelis, in 2009 he publicly called for the convening of a conference of Arab and Israeli writers under the sponsorship of the President of the United States and the UN Secretary General, which would discuss methods to warm the hearts of the people in the region and shatter the barriers of fear and mistrust that exist between them.66 Salim, who was expelled from the Egyptian Writers Union due to his visits to Israel, identified a direct reciprocity between the refusal to normalize relations with the Israeli ‘other’ and the fanaticism toward

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those with ‘other opinions’ within Egypt itself.67 In his sardonic style he portrayed the absurdity inherent to the rejection of normalization: If the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front68 will allow me to advise it as a leading expert on all matters of normalization, I will guide it on how to garner accolades for its work. The eyes of the world do not perceive us positively when we prevent [an Egyptian] movie actor from acting in a film with an Israeli actor or editor. Instead, we can issue a resolution that will compel the director not to shoot them together, but each one separately and then photomontage them afterwards. When an [Israeli] actress is in question, the Egyptian protagonist should refuse the part if it includes loving her or even just being friendly to her. In fact, it is better if he kills her in the movie altogether. If the film is accepted for the Cannes Film Festival the [Egyptian] star should not walk down the red carpet alongside an [Israeli] actor or actress, but outside the carpet or on a parallel trajectory. If we are discussing [association] football, then the [Egyptian] Football Federation should enforce a uniform contract on international clubs, in which we will allow an Egyptian football player to play in a team only if it has no more than one Israeli player, and as long as the Egyptian player does not pass the Israeli the ball or receive his pass, even if he has an opengoal opportunity to score. If [the Israeli player] should pass the ball [to the Egyptian player] in an attempt to entangle him in normalization, the latter should immediately kick that ball out of bounds. You think I am joking? I swear I do not. You are the ones making a mockery of all of us.69

Sad al-Din Ibrahim, born in 1938, is another prominent voice in the liberal ‘peace camp’. Ibrahim, who has dual Egyptian and American citizenship, wrote his doctoral dissertation in sociology at Washington University in 1968, and after his return to Egypt was a social sciences professor at the American University in Cairo. In his youth he favoured Nasserism,70 but from the early 1980s his writings demonstrated a liberal inclination. In 1988 he founded the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo, which he runs to this day. The centre works to promote democracy, civil society, civil and human rights, women’s rights, minority rights and the peaceful resolution of conflicts. In its initial years the centre operated with the consent of the Egyptian regime, but the regime’s position altered when Ibrahim started challenging Mubarak. On 30 June 2000, Ibrahim was arrested with twentyseven of his workers. He was charged with damaging the state’s image and receiving money from external sources without governmental authorization,71 and was sentenced to seven years in prison. In actuality, the sentence was an attempt to silence Ibrahim’s centre after it had accused the regime of irregularities and forgery in the 1995 Egyptian

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parliamentary elections and demanded objective supervision over the 2000 elections and an amendment of the article in the constitution that identified sharia as the principal source of legislation. In March 2003, following American pressure, Ibrahim was released. He continued his subversive activities against Mubarak’s regime and announced his nomination for the first pluralistic elections for president in 2005, which he then withdrew upon learning that the campaign was a farce intended to perpetuate the rule of Mubarak and his family. In 2007, following incessant harassment by the regime, Ibrahim went into exile, dividing his time between the US, Turkey, Britain and Qatar, and served on the board of trustees of the Arab Democracy Foundation in Doha. He returned to Egypt in 2010.72 Ibrahim underwent a long journey before adopting the banner of peace. His conclusion following the 1967 defeat was to modernize the methods of fighting Israel. In July 1968 he called on Arabs – and first and foremost on Palestinians – to embark on a prolonged guerrilla war against the people of Israel that would neutralize its superiority, exhaust its powers and consume its resources. He estimated that in such a war, Israel would kill thousands of Palestinian civilians, failing to differentiate between them and the combatants, thus escalating the Palestinian motivation to mobilize against it and raising international awareness of the Palestinian problem.73 In those years he systematically opposed diplomatic substitutions for the armed struggle against Israel, from Nasser’s decision in July 1970 to accept the Rogers initiative,74 through Sadat’s appeal for negotiations with Israel under American mediation that led to the interim agreements,75 to the Camp David Agreement and the peace treaty. At the time, Ibrahim believed that armed struggle was the only way to liberate the occupied territories and feared that a separate Egyptian–Israeli agreement would sever his country from the Arab world, which would then undermine Egypt’s position as its leader and transform it into an American satellite. He vehemently opposed alHakim’s call for neutrality between Arabs and Israel and claimed that Arab nationalism was an integral part of the Egyptian identity that could not be treated as a garment worn or removed according to the mood.76 In the early 1980s Ibrahim had yet to divert from his opposition to peace. In an article that he published in November 1982, at the height of the First Lebanon War, he claimed that the first years of the peace had proved him right, and Sadat and al-Hakim naïve. According to his perception, Israeli actions – the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, the annexation of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the siege of Beirut and the massacre carried out in Sabra and Shatila, for which it was indirectly responsible – asserted that the Zionist enterprise is imperialistic and

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colonialist by nature. It is based on usurping foreign lands, extracting immigrants from other countries and forcing reality by force of arms. Ibrahim wrote that Israel saw the Sadat peace initiative as a notice of surrender and understood al-Hakim’s call for Egyptian neutrality as a licence to continue its expansionistic endeavours.77 The first shift in Ibrahim’s position appeared in the late 1980s. Albeit not explicitly supporting peace, he reached the conclusion that parallel to the armed struggle, Arabs should operate non-violently as well. In an article inspired by the first Palestinian intifada, he wrote that no conflict in the Middle East in the previous four decades had been resolved by military means, while several conflicts had been resolved in non-violent ways, a shining example of which was the Sadat peace initiative.78 The 1991 publication of his book The Vindication of Sadat portrayed a more significant shift in his position on peace, in which he renounced his previous criticism of the policies of the assassinated Egyptian president. Ibrahim acknowledged Sadat’s decision as historically justified and argued that peace was necessary for the democratic and economic development of Arab societies.79 Years later he revealed that his journey from opposing to supporting the peace initiative had been gradual and had already begun in the late 1970s when a survey he was conducting revealed that four out of five Egyptians supported Sadat’s initiative. After a meeting with Sadat in 1981, not long before his assassination, his evolution continued as Sadat made him rethink his position. The journey to peace ended with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, after which Ibrahim utterly rejected radical pan-Arabism and was convinced that historical justice was on Sadat’s side.80 He regarded his personal transformation as part of a general Arab trend toward peace with Israel, beginning in 1967, and portrayed an evolutionary process of three phases: from 1967 to 1973, the rejection of peace; from 1973 to 1990, partial realism, in Egypt only; from 1991 onward, Arab realism where most Arab countries are willing to, and even interested in, reaching peace with Israel, and differ from each other only in their terms.81 In 1974, Ibrahim published a book against the budding cooperation between Egypt and the United States. In 2000, he released an updated edition of that book, and in the preface he did not spare himself criticism of his previous views: The Syrian model is the closest to what I have demanded from Sadat’s Egypt […] which means opposing peace with Israel and objecting to allying with the American camp and being subordinated to it. And here we are, in the year 2000 and [since 1967] Syria has yet to liberate an inch of its conquered land in the Golan Heights and has yet to receive one dollar of

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American aid money. Assad’s Syria is struggling in 2000, hoping to receive what Sadat received in 1977, even though it faced the same offer twentythree years ago. Sadat has bestowed many achievements upon Egypt, due to his wartime and peace initiatives and thanks to the realism and ­pragmatism he demonstrated.82

Ibrahim’s support for peace with Israel derives from an evolution in his reading of reality and not from a change in his historical perception. He still maintains that the Palestinians are the legitimate owners of Palestine and the Jews its unlawful occupiers, yet their presence on the borders, enforced as a result of the 1948 war, should be accepted out of recognition of their might and the limitations of Arab power. With this recognition in mind, he contested the analogy of Israel to the Crusaders. Indeed, he wrote, both relied on religion and based the conquering of Palestine on military force, but a major difference exists between the Crusaders and the Zionists. Throughout their reign, the Crusaders relied exclusively on military strength, while Zionism was a settlement movement for half a century and only afterwards developed a military component. Zionism first sowed its people into the land that it claimed, and those people gradually transformed into a society like all other societies, attached to the ground with planted roots and expanding through natural population growth and immigration. As a result, Jews eventually became an 80 per cent majority in Palestine, and have long since bred generations who do not know any other land and who harbour just as strong a sense of belonging as Palestine’s original inhabitants. Therefore, the Arab discourse peddling unrealistic hallucinations about the impending disappearance of Israel should be replaced with an ‘objective’ discourse that candidly evaluates the situation and deals rationally with the facts and is neither utopian nor absolute but, rather, reaffirms the self without denying the other – a discourse of ‘pluralism, co-existence, and historical reconciliations’.83 Once Ibrahim had crystallized his objection to the tyrannical nature of the Mubarak regime, his delayed support of the Sadat peace policy became a protestation against what he perceived as Arab hesitancy in negotiations with Israel. Following the failure of the Israeli– Palestinian Camp David Peace Summit in July 2000, Ibrahim assailed the fear of the Egyptian president and the Saudi King to encourage Yasir Arafat to accept Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s peace proposal. Mubarak’s explanation, as quoted by Ibrahim, according to which Arabs and Muslims cannot compromise on partial sovereignty or on joint Palestinian–Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, personified in Ibrahim’s mind the deep mental dissonance between the leaders of the

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West and those of the Orient. The mentality of the West is oriented toward the resolution of conflicts and the creation of an agenda for the future, whereas the mentality of the Orient is to first and foremost focus on maintaining the appearance of preserving sanctified historical rights, while in actuality being negligent of safeguarding them. Ibrahim lamented that Sadat was the only Arab leader in the modern age who internalized that politics is the ‘art of the possible’, and that liberating Sinai in exchange for an Israeli flag flying over a sole building in Cairo is appropriate. He mentioned that while the West venerated Sadat for his pragmatic policy, to Arabs he was a traitor and paid with his life. Ibrahim prophesied that Arab leaders will rue the missed opportunity to reclaim Palestinian rights at the Camp David Summit and will have to struggle again to receive the same offer that they rejected.84 Like al-Mahdi and Salim, Ibrahim favoured normalization with Israel and took part – especially in the 1990s – in promoting it. He believed that normalization might strengthen the Israeli peace activists who advocate for coexistence with the Palestinians and Arabs, and therefore called for a closer relationship with the Israeli peace camp while simultaneously continuing the determined struggle against the ‘Zionist zealots’ of the extremist Right.85 Following a dramatic decision determined by a single vote, the Ibn Khaldun Center, led by Ibrahim, sent a delegation to Israel at the end of 1995.86 In an interview during that visit, he expressed support for unrestrained Egyptian–Israeli cooperation to develop without the interference of political parties, governments or civil organizations.87 In the late 1990s he was among the proponents of the ‘Copenhagen Declaration’88 and glorified al-Mahdi’s book The Other Opinion as a ‘brave, honest and creative book’.89 Support for Israel was a subject of contention within his own family. He relayed how his son refused at first to taste chocolate that his mother had brought from Israel; however, two years later the son participated in a summer camp with Israeli children and befriended some of them.90 This new orientation since the late 1980s did not completely deter Ibrahim from viewing armed resistance as a legitimate way, depending on the circumstances, to obtain Arab rights. For instance, in the backdrop of the construction crisis at Har Homa neighbourhood in Jerusalem during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, Ibrahim called for a new popular Palestinian uprising, an armed Lebanese ‘resistance’, and the development of an Arab force to pressure the Israeli prime minister to honour the peace agreements.91 He agreed with Hizbullah’s kidnapping of soldiers to be used as bargaining chips for releasing Arab prisoners held by Israel and to encourage an Israeli retreat from the Shebaa Farms.92 The importance he ascribed to the

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potential utilization of military force served as another incentive for democratic reforms. Like Salim and al-Mahdi, Ibrahim regards peace as a precondition to democracy, but to him democracy is also necessary to establish the military strength that is in turn essential to trigger an Israeli compromise. For him, a democratic society has an inherent advantage in a conflict against an undemocratic society: firstly, a tyrant – charismatic as he may be – cannot wage a successful war without oversight mechanisms that guarantee accountability. Secondly, modern warfare relies extensively on sophisticated knowledge of weapons systems, budgets and balances of power, and societies that are not free tend to be inferior in those realms.93 On these subjects, Ibrahim relied on the book published by Constantine Zurayq in 1948, on the lessons of the defeat by Israel.94 Egyptian intellectuals dominate the contemporary Arab liberal ‘peace camp’. This is due to the liberal tradition in Egypt and to a measure of governmental legitimacy since the 1970s for this kind of agenda. The number of Palestinian liberals is small as a result of a reversal of the aforementioned conditions. A prominent figure in the Palestinian liberal camp is Sari Nusayba, a philosophy professor and the president of al-Quds University. Born in 1949 to one of the most distinguished families in Jerusalem, Nusayba sided with the ‘two states for two peoples’ solution adopted by the PLO under the leadership of Arafat, yet from the late 1980s he expressed three anomalous positions in the Palestinian discourse: (a) rejection of violent struggle as a method for achieving national goals, emphasizing the virtues of a non-violent struggle that garners widespread support from both sides; (b) acceptance of certain aspects of the Zionist historical narrative and expression of empathy for Jewish history; (c) calling on the Palestinian leadership to adopt a ‘can do’ policy in negotiations with Israel and devote itself to the establishment of a state and the rehabilitation of society. Nusayba integrated these three positions in his vision of independent Palestine as a liberal and democratic country.95 Nusayba, who after the Six Day War volunteered in Kibbutz Hazorea in order to become more familiar with Israeli society, was involved with a few Israeli–Palestinian groups after the inception of the first intifada: in 1990, he participated in theoretical Palestinian–Israeli negotiations held in Washington, DC and sponsored by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, where he presented a model for a peace arrangement between the sides;96 on 28 December 2001, at the height of the al-Aqsa intifada, he wrote with the Peace Now movement in Israel a shared vision paper that called for the cessation of violence and the renewal of peace talks; and in 2003, with Ami Ayalon, former Head of the Shin Bet, the Israeli internal

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security service, he launched The People’s Voice, a civil initiative signed by 160,000 Palestinian citizens and 250,000 Israeli citizens supporting an agreement based on the principles of two states for two peoples, a return of the Palestinian refugees only to a demilitarized Palestinian state, Jerusalem as the capital of both states, an end to all future claims by both sides and land swaps.97 However, despite his dedication, courage, eloquence and academic stature, he remained a marginal figure in Palestinian politics. Nusayba was one of the few Arab intellectuals who regarded the Palestinian refusal of the offer to end the conflict, made by the Israeli dovish government at Camp David in July 2000, as a missed opportunity, stating that Arafat ‘blew it by not closing some sort of deal in Camp David’.98 He encouraged Palestinians not to insist on the complete fulfilment of the right of return and to settle for what they could realistically obtain, noting that they have two rights – the right to live in freedom and independence and the right of return – and ‘very often in life one has to forego the implementation of one right in order to implement the other’.99 In an article published in 2009 that has elicited threats on his life, he hinted that Jewish presence in the Temple Mount compound preceded the Muslim one and called on each side to show tolerance toward the history of the other, instead of fighting and trying to disprove it.100 A speech he delivered at the Hebrew University in October 2001, at the climax of the second intifada, summarized Nusayba’s perception of peace: Israelis and Palestinians are not enemies at all. If anything, we are strategic allies. Israelis may think that America is their real ally, and Palestinians think that Arabs or Muslims are theirs; in truth, the only two parties who are objectively allied with each other are the Israelis and Palestinians, because, like it or not, we have a shared future. Our mutual interest that the future be better than the present creates an objective alliance between us.101

The life story of Hazim Saghiya, a Lebanese voice of pragmatic liberal thought, is a tumultuous one; born in 1951 to an Arab Christian Orthodox family, he went on to study at Cambridge University in 1970, and upon his return to Lebanon worked as a journalist at al-Safir. In 1988, he left his country again and spent the majority of his time in England after becoming a columnist and an editor of the opinion pages of al-Hayah. During his youth he received a pan-Arab education and belonged to the Nasserist organization al-Talia al-Arabiyya. In the first half of the 1970s he became involved with the ideas of the Marxist Left, and when the Islamic Revolution erupted in Iran he supported it in the

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hope – that vanished soon enough – that it would form an ideal regime that incorporates democracy and socialism; in the 1980s he started to develop a liberal worldview that in the 1990s matured into a formulated doctrine.102 Saghiya’s approach toward Israel was presented in a book he published in 1997, entitled Difaan an al-Salam (In Defense of Peace). Like other liberals, he based his support for peace on two pragmatic arguments: firstly, the continuation of the military struggle with Israel will prevent Arab states from treating urgent domestic matters and strengthen the tyranny of the army. Peace, on the other hand, will ameliorate their integration into the globalization movement and garner achievements such as economic development, political liberalization, the acquisition of technological skills, the promotion of women’s rights, the eradication of illiteracy and the advancement of education.103 Secondly, Israel, which is now a nuclear power, has become a finite reality that Arabs cannot alter.104 According to Saghiya, Arabs should understand that the conflict with Israel will not be resolved with an ideal solution ‘gift-wrapped in colourful paper’ that will return to them their full rights. The accepted solution should reflect the balance of power on the ground. Even though virtue and justice are on the Arab side, there are many examples of how the insistence on rights caused the obliteration of entire peoples; for instance, the Native Americans who could not adjust to the harsh and merciless world reality. To avoid a similar fate, Arabs should acknowledge their defeats and the victories achieved by Israel. Doing so will promote a broad and realistic historical context and cast a new light on the notion of peace with Israel. It will also demonstrate to them that the Oslo Accords were not unjust to the Palestinians, but in fact gave them a better agreement than they deserved based on the balance of power on the ground.105 History, in Saghiya’s mind, is a conscious tool that can be shaped according to the needs of political realism, and he called on Arabs to develop a new, conflict-related narrative that will enable them to come to terms with the existence of a Jewish state. That narrative includes internalizing the reality of dual rights in Palestine, both Palestinian and Jewish, which need to peacefully coincide; conceptualizing a method to lay the groundwork for ‘adding the Jewish color to the multiple colours of the Arab-Islamic region’;106 decreeing that even if the fathers of Zionism did infringe on Palestinian rights, their sons and grandsons, born in Israel and constituting the majority of its inhabitants, cannot be held accountable and at the most can be called upon to make reparations;107 and understanding that the inhabitants of Palestine were indeed

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victims of the Jewish emigration from Europe, but the world shutting its doors to refugees fleeing Nazi persecution had left the Jews with no alternative.108 Arabs should not deny the Holocaust, and in order to establish peaceful relations with Israel, they must recognize the universal responsibility that unites humankind: The common Arab perception that we have paid for something that we have nothing to do with, and it has nothing to do with us, is both true and untrue. It is true that we had nothing to do with [the Holocaust], but it is untrue that it does not relate to us. It is an undeniable relationship, not only because we have paid for it, but also because of our joint responsibility as part of humankind […] the view that ‘it does not concern us’ connotes isolationism and narrow-mindedness. A person hurt by an earthquake or flood cannot say ‘it does not concern me’, even if he himself did not cause the natural disaster.109

Saghiya called for Arabs and Israelis to meet and discuss topics such as literature, cinema, architecture and cooking. For him, the inability of the two sides to differentiate between the political and other realms attests to backwardness and lack of logic, as it prevents them from uniting against mutual adversaries in other countries, like Jean-Marie Le Pen.110 In a book co-written with Tunisian liberal Salih Bashir, the two suggested normalization as a tool to reinvigorate the impasse that dominated the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the early 2000s. According to the book, Israel refrained from taking risks for peace, due to its irrational security fears, its military superiority that ensures its ability to defend itself even without peace and the hostility that Arab societies and their regimes project toward it. The diplomatic status quo perpetuated by Israel’s fears is harmful for Arabs because the Palestinian problem delays their integration into the modern world. The Arab side has an interest in challenging the status quo, as Arab-initiated cultural normalization may prove to be the ‘tie-breaker’ that will assist the peace forces in Israel to assuage the fears of Israeli public opinion toward an agreement.111 A few revolutionary exiles striving to change their countries’ regimes were among the liberals who in the 1990s created the association between peace with Israel and the promotion of democracy. Prominent among them are Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiyya, Iraqi Shiites who held crucial roles in lobbying George W. Bush’s administration to go to war in Iraq. Chalabi (1944–2015) was a banker, holding a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and a son to one of the wealthiest families in Iraq that fled the country in 1958 with the fall of the Hashemite dynasty. During his studies in America he grew close to two rising stars of the second generation of neo-conservatives,

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Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. In 1992 he founded the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization for movements striving to oust Saddam Hussein. Makiyya was born in 1949, studied architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has since divided his time between England and the United States. In the 1970s he identified with Nayif Hawatma’s Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; however, he gradually abandoned Marxism and adopted Western liberal thought as an ideological platform and a cure for the ailments of the Middle East.112 In 1989 he published under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil the book Republic of Fear, a portrayal of the atrocities of the Saddam regime. With the outbreak of the Gulf War he became a media persona in the United States and alongside other Iraqi exiles drafted Charter 91. Its name deliberately alluded to Charter 77, the founding document of the democratic reform movement in Czechoslovakia. It called for the establishment of a tolerant, equal, democratic and peaceful Iraq with a rehabilitated civil society. Chalabi and his organization were seminal in leading George W. Bush’s administration to believe that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons and that a broad and established movement capable of replacing Saddam’s regime was in place. Makiyya played an important role in cultivating hostile public opinion toward Hussein in the United States, creating the impression among senior officials that the American forces would be welcomed, instilling the belief that a ‘new Iraq’ would be established based on a cross-denominational identity and convincing the administration to de-Bathesize the country after the American occupation. He watched the live historic broadcast of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad with President Bush.113 Chalabi and Makiyya did not exert any real influence in Iraq itself. Their knowledge of what was transpiring in the country was limited, and it confused wishful thinking with reality, as is often the case with exiles who have not returned to their countries for many years. The George W. Bush administration adopted their policy because they told it what it wanted to hear. The doctrine assumed by the administration after 9/11 linked the stability and security of the Middle East with its democratization. By persistently and consistently claiming that Iraq was ready for and wanted democracy, Chalabi and Makiyya found attentive ears. Their perception of the Israeli–Arab conflict was strewn with the pragmatism that defines other liberals: support for an agreement and normalization, based on the understanding that most efforts should be diverted inwardly, the realization that Arab states are incapable of defeating Israel on the battlefield and the internalization that a state of war serves the undemocratic Arab regimes.114 However, the position

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of Chalabi and Makiyya also originated from a unique motivation – their desire to convince Israeli officials and sympathizers to promote their goals with the American administration. They realized that an assurance of the ‘new Iraq’ as a peace-supporting force, or at least not impeding it, was vital to the promotion of their own agenda in American public opinion, and especially among the Jewish lobby and neo-conservatives. The empowerment of the State of Israel was one of the cornerstones of the neo-conservative doctrine, as developed from the early 1970s. George Packer, who researched the steps that led to the campaign in Iraq, determined that in the preceding years and months, the two said ‘all the right things’ to government officials and the American public regarding Israelrelated issues. Chalabi assured a Jewish-American audience that Saddam could be overthrown with only moderate American support, and that on the ruins of his regime a democratic republic could be established that would assume friendly relations with Israel;115 Makiyya claimed, in response to a question by George W. Bush on whether the Iraqi people hated Israelis, that his countrymen are far too preoccupied with their own oppression to deal with the Israeli–Arab conflict.116 Additionally, the two did not shy away from direct contact with Israelis, despite the realization that it might harm their legitimacy in Iraq. Chalabi outlined the details of his plan to bring down Saddam Hussein in an extensive interview with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth (‘Give me a year and 96 million dollars and I’ll give you Saddam’s head’).117 Makiyya, who visited Israel three times between the Gulf War and the Iraq War, maintained friendly relations with Israelis and was willing to accept an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University after the defeat of Saddam. However, asked whether an Israeli–Iraqi peace was possible, he gave a diplomatic answer similar to the one he had given to George W. Bush prior to the war: the Iraqi people are currently too busy with their own affairs to think about that.118 In history sometimes a fine line separates the comic from the tragic and world glory from unforgiving defeat. The story of Chalabi and Makiyya proves this: these two unknown figures raised some eyebrows at first, then rose to the stature of heroes for toppling Saddam Hussein by their power of persuasion, only to end up being blamed for dragging the American army into a failed war. Farid al-Ghadri, an American businessman born in Aleppo, Syria in 1954, was encouraged by the success of the Iraqi National Congress to adopt a similar strategy. He announced the founding of the Reform Party of Syria and declared its goal to be the removal of the Assad regime and the establishment of a democratic republic that would uphold human rights. He visited Israel, met with members of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee of the Israeli

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Parliament (where he was affronted by Arab Members of Parliament), and promoted his party in the Israeli media. He declared, among other things, that a peace agreement would only become possible when Syria was democratic, and promised that the moment this transpired, ‘the two countries can swiftly reach an agreement over the Golan Heights’.119 Nonetheless, he did not manage to garner much interest in Israel, nor to reach a position of influence within the Bush administration. In the popular uprising that erupted in 2011 against Bashar al-Assad’s regime he did not hold any real role, as far as one can tell.

The liberal ‘refusal camp’ In opposition to liberals championing peace since the early 1990s, other liberals represent a more stern position toward Israel. These liberals do not call for the annihilation of the state of Israel, nor principally object to recognizing it and achieving peace with it as Islamists have; yet they do demand of their countries, and of Arab countries in general, to stand up to Israel’s ‘aggression’ and to force it to withdraw from all territories it has occupied in 1967 and grant Palestinians what they perceive as their legitimate rights. Their stance differs from that of the liberal ‘peace camp’ on four crucial points. Firstly, while ‘peace camp’ liberals have based their view on the pragmatic argument of power limitations, the ‘refusal camp’ regards national honour and the legitimate rights of Arabs, and specifically of Palestinians, as non-negotiable values. This disjuncture resembles the split in the liberal camp, from the 1930s until the founding of Israel, between those who emphasized the liberal component of democracy and those who prioritized the need for national liberation and sovereignty. Secondly, while ‘peace camp’ liberals focus their criticism on Arab regimes for not taking the extra, conciliatory step toward peace, ‘refusal camp’ proponents maintain that Arab regimes have conceded too much to Israel, doing so without the legitimacy of their publics and in a manner contrary to the national interest. Thirdly, while ‘peace camp’ liberals call (and act) on broadening normalization and turning the peace into a peace between the peoples, the ‘refusal camp’ rejects altogether the establishment of any cultural, scientific and economic relations with Israel, so long as the conflict is on-going. In addition, they do not demonstrate any empathy for the Zionist historical narrative. Fourthly, while ‘peace camp’ liberals regard a comprehensive arrangement for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a prerequisite for the democratization of Arab societies, the ‘refusal’ liberals portray democracy as a prerequisite for the social, economic and military growth that

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will in turn enable the Arabs to compel Israel, through diplomatic or military means, to accept their terms for peace. As opposed to ‘peace camp’ liberals who remained a marginal, if not ostracized, voice, some ‘refusal’ liberals influenced public opinion and served as substantial opposition to their regime. The proximity of their position on Israel to that of other adversarial forces, mainly the Islamists, allowed for a measure of cooperation that was impossible for the ‘peace camp’. A veteran proponent of the ‘refusal camp’ was Constantine Zurayq, who reiterated old positions in addressing dramatically changing geopolitical circumstances. Zurayq rejected Arab participation in the Madrid Conference, claiming that the post-Gulf War power balance forced Arabs to negotiate from a position of inferiority;120 he rejected the Declaration of Principles, due to what he perceived as far-reaching Palestinian concessions to Israel.121 Almost half a century after he began to grapple with the question of Israel and coined the term nakba, he claimed in an interview that the conflict would not be resolved so long as Israel adhered to the Zionist doctrine that perceives Jews as the ­proprietors of the land of Palestine.122 Other, younger Syrian liberals have articulated similar ideas. Burhan Ghalyun (b. 1945), a sociology professor at the Sorbonne, has written since the 1970s about the damage caused to Arab societies by tyranny. He earned his reputation as an intellectual, but received political recognition only with the outbreak of the Arab Spring. For a little under a year he served as the chair of the Syrian National Transitional Council – an umbrella organization for partners in the uprising against Assad both in Syria and abroad. Ghalyun regarded the Oslo Accords as an Arab failure, with the Palestinians on the losing end of it,123 and maintained that a stipulation for peace is that Israel should relinquish the Zionist colonialist ideology according to which Jews are a ‘people with no land in a land with no people’.124 He argued that only the establishment of a democracy would enable the mobilization of the Syrian people for a real struggle against Israel125 and offered an original explanation for the failure of the negotiations between Israel and its neighbours in the 1990s: the lack of democracy in the Arab world led the Americans – operating from the assumption that Arab regimes enjoy complete power, are not subjugated to public opinion and are unaccountable to their people – to pressure the Arabs, and the Arabs alone, to make ­unacceptable c­ oncessions for peace.126 Egyptian politician Ayman Nur was a prominent member of the liberal opposition to the Mubarak regime in the decade prior to the Arab Spring, paying for his courage with his freedom. He depicted

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Israeli–Egyptian relations as a testimony of the failure of the regime, not because of its lack of efforts to promote peace but, rather, due to its leniency and corruption that enabled Israel to commit crimes unchallenged. In Nur’s view, Egyptian–Israeli relations demonstrate the discord between the Egyptian people and its unelected leadership. Nur’s political biography symbolizes the viability of Egyptian liberalism in contemporary times, but also its division and weaknesses. Born in 1962 to a father who was a lawyer and a Member of Parliament, in 1992 he published a book whose title Liberalism is the Solution paraphrased the Muslim Brothers’ slogan – ‘Islam is the solution’. In 1995 he completed his doctorate in law in Russia and was elected to the People’s Assembly, representing the Wafd. He resigned in 2003 and formed an independent liberal party called al-Ghad (Tomorrow) and two years later announced his candidacy when Mubarak agreed, under American pressure, to pluralistic presidential elections. As the Muslim Brothers was banned from participating, he became the only serious opposition to the reign of the Mubarak family and received 7 per cent of the votes (international observers claimed that he actually received 13 per cent). After the elections, in a legal farce orchestrated by upper echelons, he was accused of forging signatures in his party’s registration documents and sentenced to five years in prison. Following his release in February 2009,127 he continued to contest the regime and tried to enlist the United States in toppling it. When the 25 January revolution broke out, he was at the head of the protestors. Interior struggles had split his party into two factions, with each keeping the binding name of ‘tomorrow’ – the historic al-Ghad and Ghad al-Thawra (the latter branched off under Nur’s leadership). In the first free elections for the Egyptian Parliament Nur ran as part of a political alliance led by the Muslim Brothers, yet he dissolved this partnership after the swearing-in of Parliament. He was not allowed to participate in the presidential elections, due to having been convicted of allegedly falsifying documents, and in the second round of the presidential election in June 2012 he supported the Muslim Brothers’ candidate Muhammad Mursi. Nur interpreted the history of Israeli–Egyptian relations, both in wartime and in peace, as an Egyptian defeat originating from a solitary reason – the reign of tyranny. ‘How can anyone who is defeated from within win?!’ he asked rhetorically in an article commemorating the forty-first anniversary of the Six Day War. He continued, ‘how can he fight when his hands are tied and he is oppressed by all of the mechanisms, worthless and devoid of opinion?! How can he triumph when he is denied the basic right to choose who will lead him and who will represent him?!’128 The obvious conclusion: democracy is

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vital both to liberate the Egyptian people and to withstand Egypt’s enemy. The platform of the al-Ghad party, which relied on a book Nur wrote in 2002 and was adopted by Ghad al-Thawra, supported intensifying the struggle against Israel. Alongside generalized comments about the party’s belief in the peaceful resolution of conflicts, the platform demanded Arab countries to reunite against ‘the Zionist enemy’, criticized them for not implementing effective methods to terminate the ‘bloodshed on Palestinian lands’ and supported a violent struggle against Israel, including suicide bombings, as a means to pressure it to uphold UN Resolution 242.129 Al-Ghad assailed the ‘helplessness’ of the Egyptian regime in light of the Israeli crimes130 and conditioned the promotion of normalization on achieving a comprehensive agreement.131 In July 2009, in an assembly that the party held addressing the ‘crime’ of exporting natural gas to Israel at a price under market value, Nur called for the preparation of a black list that would include President Mubarak, his son Jamal and other administration officials, ‘who will be persecuted for squandering Egypt’s natural resources’.132 After the 25 January revolution he declared that the Camp David Agreements ‘are not a holy text like the Quran’ and that ‘significant amendments’ befitting the renewed geo-political circumstances should be made, especially regarding restrictions on the Egyptian military presence in Sinai.133 He explained his suggestion to hold a public referendum to rule on the amendment of the agreement: ‘there is a group, to which I also belong, who believes that the Camp David Agreements are obsolete and should be rectified as several of their conditions are discriminating against the Egyptian side. There is another group, which believes that the agreements give Egypt certain assurances that should not be jeopardized at this point. I do not share this view, but what I think does not matter and we should hold a public referendum [on the matter].’134 The tension between his hostile attitude toward Israel and his wish to maintain a good rapport with the American administration put Nur in an awkward position. In early November 2009, he published a letter to the Wall Street Journal that responded to an article in the paper accusing him of defining Israel in an anti-Semitic manner as ‘the enemy behind which lies all evils, conspiracies and threats that are spawned against Egypt’.135 Nur justified himself by claiming that: Anyone examining my record can easily discern that I have always supported and upheld Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, and have strongly opposed calls of aggression against Israel. I have also consistently called for a peaceful and just resolution to the Arab–Israeli conflict. […] I would

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like to conclude that the ‘anti-Semitic’ label is one that I strongly reject. My critiques pertain to the conduct of the state of Israel in certain contexts and not to the Jewish people as a whole.136

Nevertheless, the next day Nur was quick to deny to the Egyptian press the explanations that had been attributed to him. He claimed that the name Israel had never been mentioned in his original letter, and blamed the American paper for falsifying what he had said.137 Another prominent Mubarak opponent whose views with regard to peace with Israel are even more hostile than those of Nur is Ala alAswani, an author born in 1957. A dentist by profession, al-Aswani received praise for his 2002 realistic novel Imarat Yaqubyan (The Yacoubian Building). The book, mercilessly describing the degeneration of Egypt under Mubarak – with its political corruption, moral decay and dire economy – was one of the biggest best sellers in the history of the Arab world and was also adapted into a well-made film and a television series. In hindsight, its broad success can be viewed as a premonition of the 25 January revolution. Al-Aswani, an active member of the Kifaya movement that since 2004 had demanded that Mubarak’s son should not succeed him, demonstrated in Tahrir Square throughout the eighteen days leading to the overthrow of the president.138 Sad al-Din Ibrahim read Imarat Yaqubyan during his incarceration and described the enthusiasm with which the book was received in prison as inmates and guards alike anxiously waited their turn to borrow it. Upon reading the book, they participated in heated discussions late into the night in a manner that blurred the lines between the prisoners and their guards, which Ibrahim believed contributed to the humanization of the prison experience. Ibrahim commented with a hint of bitterness that, even though they shared the same critical stance, al-Aswani won fame and fortune, while he was imprisoned for his oppositional activities;139 however, this is not the only difference between the two. To al-Aswani the Israeli-Egyptian peace has been a historical mistake: a deception by an unelected regime that harmed national interest. Israel is an enemy by whom Egypt was defeated twice: in wars – led by a nonpluralistic regime that was not susceptible to criticism and therefore failed; and in peace – where Egypt, led by that same unelected regime, relinquished its national dignity for a piece of bread and ended up without dignity and without bread. Al-Aswani contested claims by the Mubarak regime that the Palestinian problem is the reason for the delay in the democratization of Egypt. He wrote that when the Camp David Agreements were signed, Egyptians were told that peace would lead to democratization and economic

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welfare; however, a quarter of a century later, tyranny has increased, as well as poverty, and the Palestinian problem remains the same.140 In the backdrop of the al-Aqsa intifada in April 2003, Al-Aswani wrote that Israelis are a ‘bunch of murderers that never respect their contracts’, and therefore there is no reason to believe, that once finished with their exploits in Palestine, they will not attack Egypt. He complained that the regime’s response to acts committed by Israel did not reflect the people’s wish to show solidarity with the Palestinians, and asserted that in order to attain that goal the Egyptian people were willing to pay any price, even to the extent of severing relations with Israel.141 During the Second Lebanon War al-Aswani attacked the ‘disgraceful softness’ of the Arab regimes. He claimed that it was the result of the undemocratic way in which they attained power, and that regimes owing their survival to the goodwill of the United States could not be expected to act differently. He claimed that ‘our war with Israel should start from within, because if we had elected leaders, Israel would never have been able to defeat us, as powerful as it may be’.142 Al-Aswani’s objection to any signs of normalization with Israel came to a climax when the Israel–Palestine Center for Research and Information, led by Gershon Baskin, translated his book and distributed it for free over the internet. The translation was made without any profit motive but to make Egyptian culture and society accessible to an Israeli audience. This un-atonable sin infuriated al-Aswani, who threatened to sue the Center. He explained that he had nothing against Jews and the Hebrew language and proclaimed his fierce objection to the harming of the innocent and any manifestations of anti-Semitism. However, to him, Israel represented a ‘red line’ as a colonial, settler, barbaric, fascist and criminal country, and he was unwilling to have any relations with it, including the translation of his books by an institution operating within its borders. In this regard, he told of a press conference at the Paris Book Fair in which he had participated alongside Amos Oz, ‘the greatest Israeli novelist’, according to al-Aswani. At the fair Oz drew an analogy between the British occupations of Egypt and of Israel. In response, alAswani explained to him that the analogy was an example of confusing imagination with reality, as Israel did not even exist prior to the British occupation of Palestine; hence, the British did not occupy Israel, on the contrary, they created it. As Judaism is a religion, not a nationality, and Jews constituted a small minority in Palestine, the existence of their state is a historical injustice. According to al-Aswani, these remarks won for him the discreet blessing of several of the participants at the book fair, and left Oz speechless.143

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Conclusion Since the 1920s Zionism has been a major topic in Arab liberal thought. Until the founding of the State of Israel, some liberals supported pragmatic reconciliation with the Zionist enterprise and others called to fight it. This gap represented a deep rift in the liberal camp between those who were willing to compromise with Western powers and advocated for a gradual progression toward democracy, and those who emphasized the necessity of a total release from the shackles of imperialism. At the height of Nasserism, pragmatic liberalism was muted. Its resurgence began in Egypt parallel to a measure of flexibility in the position of the regime after the defeat in the Six Day War. Sadat’s aspirations for peace were enthusiastically supported by a few Egyptian liberals, but not by liberals outside of Egypt. From the 1990s the affinity between the future of the Israeli–Arab conflict and of democracy in the Arab world became a fundamental issue in liberal thought. A general consensus developed that a linkage exists between the protraction of the conflict and the lack of democracy in Arab societies, yet liberals were divided as to the meaning of that linkage. The liberal ‘peace camp’ adopted an approach that pressed for reconciliation with Israel, based on the assumption that without a comprehensive agreement it will be impossible to promote democracy in Arab societies. The ‘refusal camp’ promoted a stance that argued for democratization on the assumption that, without democratization, Arab societies will be ill-equipped for a struggle against Israel. Both the ‘peace camp’ and the ‘refusal camp’ perceived the protraction of the Arab–Israeli conflict as evidence of the failure of unelected Arab regimes and the need to replace them. Yet while the former believed that the despotic nature of the regimes prevented them from ‘crossing the Rubicon’ in terms of concessions necessary to resolve the conflict, the latter concluded that the despotic nature allowed the regimes to make exaggerated and dangerous concessions. The liberal ‘peace camp’ called for the strengthening of relations between Jews and Arabs and operated for the attainment of that goal, whereas the liberal ‘refusal camp’ called for the curtailment of normalization and acted to thwart it.

Notes 1 The quotations are from are a collector’s issue of Maariv, published on 26 March 1975 on the Hebrew University’s 50th anniversary (in Hebrew).

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2 H. Erlich, Students and University in 20th Century Egyptian Politics (London: Frank Cass, 1989), pp. 63, 88; A. Abd al-Rahman, Misr wa-Filastin (Kuwait: al-Majlis al-Watani lil-Thaqafa wal-Funun wal-Adab, February 1980), pp. 91–5, 175–6. 3 Abd al-Rahman, Misr wa-Filastin, pp. 108–11; A. A. M. el-Awaisi, The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1988), p. 22. 4 Abd al-Rahman, Misr wa-Filastin, pp. 61–2, 107–11. 5 El-Awaisi, The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question, pp. 22–3. 6 Abd al-Rahman, Misr wa-Filastin, pp. 63–4, 93–5, 102–7, 192–3. 7 G. H. Talhami, Palestine and Egyptian National Identity (New York and London: Praeger, 1992), p. 15; Abd al-Rahman, Misr wa-Filastin, pp. 93–4. 8 Ibid., pp. 93–5, 226–30; J. Jankowski, ‘The government of Egypt and the Palestine Question, 1936–1939’, Middle Eastern Studies, 17:4 (October 1981), 428–33. 9 Ibid., pp. 428–30, 434–5. 10 Abd al-Rahman, Misr wa-Filastin, pp. 230–1; Jankowski, ‘The government of Egypt and the Palestine Question, 1936–1939’, 436–42. 11 H. al-Namnam, Taha Hussein wal-Sahyuniyya (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 2010), p. 148. 12 Ibid., p. 162. 13 M. Badrawi, Ismail Sidqi (1875–1950): Pragmatism and Vision in Twentieth Century Egypt (Richmond: Curzon, 1996), pp. 178–9; A. al-Mahdi, al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili: Azmat al-Dimuqratiyya wal-Salam (Cairo: Al-Dar al-Arabiyya lil-Nashr, 1999), p. 27. 14 H. Erlich, Egypt – The Older Sister (Tel-Aviv: The Open University, 2003, in Hebrew), pp. 86–7; Abd al-Rahman, pp. 247–9, 261; S. Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians (London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 338–9. 15 I. Rabinovich, ‘The Greater Syria plan and the question of the land of Israel: Historical roots, 1918–1939’, Cathedra, 7 (Nisan, 1977), in Hebrew, 106; P. S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 263–6. 16 M. Maoz, Syria – To Arabism and Back (Raanana: The Open University, 2011, in Hebrew), p. 39. 17 Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 470–80, 536–9, 544–5, 556, 558–9. 18 Ibid., pp. 542–6, 554–6, 558–9; Maoz, Syria – To Arabism and Back, pp. 41–2. 19 Ibid., p. 43. 20 Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. 548–52; M. Maoz, Israel–Syria: The End of the Conflict?! (Or Yehuda: Sifriyat Maariv, 1996, in Heberw), pp. 23–4. 21 Maoz, Syria – To Arabism and Back, pp. 44–9; I. Rabinovich, ‘Syria, Israel and the Palestine Question’, The Wiener Library Bulletin, 31:47/48 (1978), 135–6.

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22 I. Koplewitz, Taha Hussein and the Revival of Egypt (Jerusalem: the Bialik Institute, 2001, in Hebrew), pp. 128–9. 23 Al-Namnam, Taha Hussein wal-Sahyuniyya, pp. 144–6. 24 A. al-Imam, al-Sulh maa Israil (Cairo: Dar al-Jumhuriyya, n.d.), p. 190. 25 Al-Namnam, Taha Hussein wal-Sahyuniyya, pp. 234–41. 26 Ibid., p. 154. 27 C. Zurayq, Mana al-Nakba (Beirut: Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayin, 1948), pp. 71–80. 28 Ibid., pp. 25, 28, 31–3, 44–5, 50–1, 53, 56, 60–2. 29 C. Zurayq, ‘Rethinking the Nakba’, trans. Y. Drori, in Y. Harkabi (ed.), What the Arabs Learned from their Defeat (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1972, in Hebrew), pp. 192, 199. 30 C. Zurayq, Nahnu wal-Mustaqbal (Beirut: Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayin, 1977), pp. 361–2, 409. 31 Y. Amitay, Egypt and Israel – A Look from the Left: The Egyptian Left and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1978 (Haifa: University of Haifa Press and Zemorah-Bitan, 1999, in Hebrew), pp. 221–6. 32 T. al-Hakim, Awdat al-Way (Beirut: Dar al-Shuruq, 1974), pp. 56–60. 33 As quoted in S. Somekh, Call it Dreaming, Memoirs 1951–2000 (Bnei Brak: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008, in Hebrew), pp. 182–4. 34 T. al-Hakim, Wathaiq fi Tariq Awdat al-Way (Cairo and Beirut: Dar alShuruq, 1975), pp. 45–8. 35 N. Mahfuz, ‘A non-conformist interview for al-Qabas newspaper’, trans. A. Manna, in M. Peled and S. Shamir (eds), Egyptian Writers and Thinkers on National Goals (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975, in Hebrew), p. 114. 36 The Knesset’s website: ‘Interim agreement between Israel and Egypt: 4.9.1975’ (n.d.): www.knesset.gov.il/process/docs/egypt_interim_eng.htm (accessed June 2012). 37 N. Mahfuz, ‘The lessons from October 6’, trans. M. Sela, in E. Sivan (ed.), The Arab Lessons from the October War (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved and The Hebrew University, 1974, in Hebrew), pp. 74–80. 38 Mahfuz, ‘A Non-conformist interview for al-Qabas newspaper’, pp. 110–14. 39 S. Moreh, ‘Najib Mahfuz – Nobel Prize laureate for literature and the problem of peace with Israel’, in E. Biton (ed.), Mabat leMitzrayim (Ramat Gan: Apirion, 1989, in Hebrew), pp. 72–4. 40 N. Mahfuz, ‘Ancient darkness’, trans. R. Yadlin, The New East, 27:3–4 (1978), in Hebrew, 302–6. 41 Amitay, Egypt and Israel – A Look from the Left, pp. 241–307. 42 See, for example, an interview with Mahfuz: A. A. al-Hamamsi, ‘al-Salam tariquna ila al-hadara’, Uktubir (10.12.1978), pp. 30–1. 43 T. al-Hakim, Tahaddiyat Sanat 2000 (al-Fajjala: Dar Misr lil-Tibaa, 1980), pp. 91–2. 44 T. al-Hakim, ‘al-Hiyad’ (al-Ahram, 3.3.1978), in S. A. Ibrahim (ed.), Urubat Misr: Hiwar al-Sabinat (Cairo: Markaz al-Dirasat al-Siyasiyya wal-Istratijiyya bil-Ahram, 1978), p. 109; T. al-Hakim, ‘al-Hiyad al-matlub’ (Akhbar al-Yawm, 18.3.1978), in ibid., pp. 111–13. On the discussion in Egypt

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regarding al-Hakim’s article, see: Ibrahim (ed.), Urubat Misr; T. al-Hakim, Tahaddiyat Sanat 2000, pp. 88–116. The Egyptian author Hussein Fawzi supported al-Hakim by arguing that only the path of neutrality could salvage Egypt from the endless problems it had encountered since 1948 following its failed wars against Israel. ‘If Switzerland is the peace oasis of Europe’, he wrote, ‘why should Egypt not become the peace oasis of Arab states?’ See: Ibrahim (ed.), Urubat Misr, pp. 113–14. 45 Somekh, Call it Dreaming, Memoirs 1951–2000, p. 184. 46 A. H. al-Sharif, Najib Mahfuz: Muhawarat Qabla Nubil ([Cairo]: Matabi Ruz al-Yusuf, 1989), pp. 16–17. 47 U. Avneri, My Enemy, My Friend (Tel-Aviv: Bitan, 1989, in Hebrew), pp. 158, 171, 177–9, 204–5 ; an interview with Dr Yossi Amitay (6.5.2012). 48 S. al-Nabulsi, al-Liberaliyyun al-Judud: Jadal Fikri (Cologne: Manshurat alJamal, 2005), pp. 20–1. 49 For al-Mahdi’s biography see: B. al-Hassan, Thaqafat al-Istislam: Qiraa Naqdiyya fi Kitabat Kanan Makiyya Hazim Saghiya Salih Bashir al-Afif alAhdar Amin al-Mahdi (Beirut: Riyadh al-Ris lil-Kutub wal-Nashr, 2005), pp. 235–7; S. Shamir, ‘Introduction’, in Amin al-Mahdi, The Other Opinion, trans. M. and D. Sagiv (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001, in Hebrew), p. xvii. 50 Al-Mahdi, al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili, p. 20. 51 Ibid., pp. 18–19, 71–3, 139–46, 213. 52 Ibid., pp. 19–21. 53 Ibid., pp. 193–5. 54 Ibid., pp. 41–7. 55 Ibid., pp. 23–4, 47–8. 56 Ibid., pp. 254–5. 57 Ibid., p. 253. 58 For the text of the declaration: www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=420& CategoryId=8 (accessed June 2012). 59 Al-Mahdi, al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili, pp. 247–51. 60 Ibid., pp. 255–8. 61 A. Salim, al-Tatarruf wa-Thaqafat al-Salam (Beirut: Madarek, 2011), pp. 9–11. 62 Ibid., pp. 23–8, 49–52. 63 Ibid., pp. 69–73. 64 A. Salim, Rihla ila Israil (Cairo: Madbuli al-Saghir, 1996), pp. 140, 184. 65 Salim, al-Tatarruf wa-Thaqafat al-Salam, pp. 137–40. 66 Ibid., pp. 191–4. 67 Ibid., pp. 137–40. 68 Salim hints in this wordplay at the anti-peace movement established in Tripoli, Libya, on December 1977, following Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem. It was named Jabhat al-Sumud wal-Tasaddi (The Steadfastness and Confrontation Front). 69 Salim, al-Tatarruf wa-Thaqafat al-Salam, pp. 179–83.

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70 S. A. Ibrahim, Kisinjir wa-Sira al-Sharq al-Aawsat (Cairo: Dar Qaba, 2000 [1974]), p. 8. 71 Ibrahim was charged with providing foreign states with information that harms the economic, social and political interests of Egypt; receiving illegal funding; striving to incite factionalism between Muslims and Copts; and acting to undermine the regime and the stability of state and to threaten the social peace. See: MEMRI, ‘The arrest of Egyptian human rights activist, Sad al-Din Ibrahim’ (30.7.2000): www.memri.org.il (accessed June 2012). 72 M. Or Amargi, Islam, Democracy and Civil Society in Modern Egypt (thesis, Haifa University, 2007, in Hebrew), pp. 4–7; MEMRI, ‘The arrest of Egyptian human rights activist, Sad al-Din Ibrahim’; I. Sayyid Ahmad and M. Adib, ‘Sad al-Din Ibrahim yaudu ila al-Qahira al-Yawm bada ghiyab 3 sanawat’ (4.8.2010): http://today.almasryalyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=264914 (accessed June 2012). 73 S. A. Ibrahim, Fi Susyulujiyyat al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili (Beirut: Dar al-Talia lil-Tibaa wal-Nashr, 1973), pp. 186–94. 74 Ibid., pp. 260–2, 275. 75 Ibrahim, Kisinjir wa-Sira al-Sharq al-Awsat, pp. 8–9. 76 Ibrahim (ed.), Urubat Misr, pp. 15, 19–20. 77 S. A. Ibrahim, ‘Awdat al-way mara ukhra ila Tawfiq al-Hakim’, in S. A. Ibrahim (ed.), Misr Turajiu Nafsaha (Cairo: Dar Qaba, 2000), pp. 296– 300. 78 S. A. Ibrahim, ‘Limadha al-la-unf fi al-Sharq al-Awsat’, in S. A. Ibrahim (ed.), Al-Muqawama al-Madaniyya fi al-Nidal al-Siyasi (Amman: Muntada al-Fikr al-Arabi, 1988), pp. 137–45. 79 See for example: S. A. Ibrahim, ‘Raddan ala Raghida Dargham: Nam bi-Yadi Amru … In Lam Tusari Aydina ila al-Taghyir’, al-Hayah (13.8.2003). 80 Tel Aviv University and The Cairo Peace Movement, ‘Round table discussion on twenty years of Egyptian–Israeli relations’, The Kaplan Chair for the History of Egypt and Israel (The Moshe Dayan Center Conference Files), 22 December 1999. 81 S. A. Ibrahim, Ilm al-Nakbat al-Arabiyya fi Idarat al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili (Cairo: Markaz Ibn Khaldun li-Tanmiya, 1998), pp. 44–6. 82 Ibrahim, Kisinjir wa-Sira al-Sharq al-Awsat, pp. 10–11. 83 S. A. Ibrahim, ‘al-Khitab al-takhdhiri fi tanawul al-sira al-Arabi al-Israili’ (26.12.2000): www.eicds.org (accessed June 2012). 84 S. A. Ibrahim, ‘Bidayat al-nidal min ajli ma rafadnahu fi Kamb Dafid’ (5.4.2001): www.eicds.org (accessed June 2012). 85 Ibrahim, Ilm al-Nakbat al-Arabiyya fi Idarat al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili, pp. 5, 20–4. 86 Y. Lerer, ‘Two States, Two Hearts that Are One: An Interview with Prof. Sad al-Din Ibrahim’, Mitzad Sheni, 1 (January 1996, in Hebrew), p. 20. 87 Ibid., 20–2. 88 Ibrahim, Ilm al-Nakbat al-Arabiyya fi Idarat al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili, pp. 42–3.

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89 S. A. Ibrahim, ‘al-Sulm La Tabnihu al-Hukumat Wahdaha, wa-Munasaratuhu La Taqtasiru ala Munasiriha’, al-Hayah (3.10.1999), p. 20. 90 Lerer, ‘Two States, Two Hearts that Are One’, p. 21. 91 Ibrahim, Ilm al-Nakbat al-Arabiyya fi Idarat al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili, pp. 8–15. 92 S. A. Ibrahim, ‘al-Israili al-aqbah wa-Lubnan mujaddadan’ (3.8.2006): www. metransparent.com/old/texts/saad_eddin_ibrahim/saad_eddin_ibrahim_ugly_ israel_and_lebanon.htm (accessed June 2012). 93 Ibrahim, Ilm al-Nakbat al-Arabiyya fi Idarat al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili, pp. 25–34, 48. 94 Ibid., pp. 74–5, 78–80. 95 S. Nusayba, al-Huriyya Bayna al-Hadd wal-Mutlaq (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 1995), pp. 139–49. 96 S. Nussibeh and M. A. Heller, No Trumpets, No Drums (London: I.B. Tauris, 1991). 97 S. Nusseibeh, with A. David, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), pp. 488, 511. 98 Ibid., p. 430. 99 Ibid., p. 446. 100 S. Nussibeh, ‘The Haram al-Sharif’, in O. Grabar and B. Z. Kedar (eds), Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade (Jerusalem and Austin, TX: Yad Ben Zvi and University of Texas Press, 2009), pp. 372–3. 101 Nusseibeh, with David, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, p. 450. 102 W. Abu-Uksa, ‘Liberalism and Left in the contemporary Arab thought’ (thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007, in Hebrew). 103 H. Saghiya, Difaan an al-Salam (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashr, June 1997), pp. 25–7, 56, 117–24. 104 Ibid., pp. 23, 52. 105 Ibid., pp. 13–14, 35–6, 45–7, 52. 106 Ibid., pp. 13–14, 18–19, 54. 107 Ibid., pp. 52–3. 108 Ibid., p. 19. 109 Ibid., pp. 64–5, 68–9. 110 Ibid., pp. 103–4. 111 H. Saghiya and S. Bashir, Tasaddu al-Mashriq al-Arabi: al-Salam al-Dami fi al- Iraq wa-Filastin (Beirut: Riyadh al-Ris lil-Kutub wal-Nashr, 2004), pp. 14–20. 112 G. Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 68–70. 113 Ibid., p. 99. 114 K. Makkiyya, ‘Kayfa Adama al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili Anzimat al-Tasallut fi al-Alam al-Arabi’, al-Hayah (5.4.1997), p. 19. 115 Packer, The Assassins’ Gate, p. 78. 116 Ibid., p. 97. 117 Yediot Aharonot, Shiva Yamim (4.12.1998), in Hebrew, pp. 12–20.

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118 S. Peri, ‘An Israeli Prize for an Iraqi Friend’, Yediot Aharonot, 24 Shaot (18.5.2003), in Hebrew, p. 5. 119 I. Harpaz, ‘Our man in Damescus’, Koteret, 2 (December 2004), in Hebrew, 44–51. 120 C. Zurayq, al-Amal al-Fikriyya al-Amma lil-Duktur Constantin Zurayq: Al-Mujallad al-Rabi (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wahda al-Arabiyya wa-Muassasat Abd al-Hamid Shumman, 1994), pp. 2138–44, 2172–6. 121 C. Zurayq, al-Urubba wa-Filastin: Hiwar Shamil maa Constantine Zurayq (Beirut: Muassasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, 1996), pp. 63–75. 122 Ibid., pp. 73–4. 123 B. Ghalyun, al-Arab wa-Marakat al-Salam (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi, 1999), pp. 25–8. 124 Ibid., pp. 218–19. 125 B. Ghalyun, al-Ikhtiyar al-Dimuqrati fi Suriya (Damascus and al-Ladhiqiyya: Bitra lil-Nashr wal-Tawzi, 2003), pp. 181–4. 126 Ghalyun, al-Arab wa-Marakat al-Salam, pp. 25–8. 127 A. Fariborz and M. Tawfik, ‘Interview with Ayman Nour: I won’t wait for the regime to give me its blessings!’ (20.3.2009): www.qantara.de/webcom/ show_article.php/_c-476/_nr-1125/i.html (accessed June 2012); Joshua Muravchik, ‘The trials of Ayman Nour’ (8.5.2006): www.wsj.com/articles/ SB114704913839246262 (accessed June 2012). For an expanded discussion on Ayman Nur and his attitudes towards Israel see: O. Winter, ‘The role of Israel in Ayman Nour’s liberal vision for Egypt’, New Middle Eastern Studies, 1 (2011): www.brismes.ac.uk/nmes/archives/319 (accessed June 2012). 128 A. Nur, ‘Am bada 40 aman’ (without date of publication): news.elghad.org (accessed June 2012). 129 Hizb al-Ghad, Barnamaj Hizb al-Ghad, pp. 14, 19, 28–9, 211–12. 130 Hizb al-Ghad, ‘Bayan al-ghad bi-khusus ahdath Ghaza’ (30.12.2008): news. elghad.org (accessed June 2012). 131 A. Nur, ‘Tadib Faruq Husni wa-ikhtiyar Ubama’ (n.d.): news.elghad.org; Himam Sarhan, ‘Man huwa Ayman Nur’ (11.4.2005): www.swissinfo.ch/ara (accessed June 2012). 132 A. Ghanim, ‘Mutamar la li-tasdir al-ghaz li-Israil’ (12.7.2009): aymannoor. net (accessed June 2012). 133 I. Jamal, ‘Ayman Nur: Iadat siyaghat “Kamb Dafid” badalan min tard al-safir’ (5.9.2001): www.youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID=486408 (accessed June 2012); M. Mustafa, ‘Nur: al-Rais al-qadim yati bi-iradat al-nas faqat wa-ittifaqiyyat Kamb Dafid laysat nassan muqaddasan aw quranan’ (13.10.2011): www.masress.com/boswtol/424 (accessed June 2012). 134 Memri TV, ‘Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour calls for referendum on Camp David Accords’ (14.2.2011): www.memritv.org/clip/en/2807.htm (accessed June 2012). 135 A. Bargisi and S. Tadros, ‘Why are Egypt’s “liberals” anti-Semitic?’ (28.10.2009): www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704335904574497 143564035718 (accessed June 2012).

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136 A. Nour, ‘I reject anti-Semitism and respect Egypt’s pluralism’ (1.11.2009): www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703792304574503831810437644 (accessed June 2012). 137 N. Fakhri, ‘Ayman Nur: lam udafi an Israil fi maqal Wall Street Jurnal’ (2.11.2009): http://youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID=152265&SecID=65&Issu eID=47 (accessed June 2012). 138 M. Kaminsky, ‘The face of Egypt’s uprising’ (13.4.2011): www.wsj.com/ articles/SB10001424052748703385404576258603352822070 (accessed June 2012). 139 S. E. Ibrahim, ‘Egypt’s tortured present’, Foreign Policy, 148 (May–June, 2005), 78–80. 140 A. al-Aswani, Limadha La Yathuru al-Misriyyun? (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2010), pp. 70–1. 141 Ibid., pp. 70–1, 75. 142 A. al-Aswani, Hal Nastahiqq al-Dimuqratiyya? (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2010), p. 25. 143 W. al-Samari and B. Ramadan, ‘Ala al-Aswani lil-Yawm al-Sabi: Lastu didd tarjamat amali lil-lugha al-Ibriyya wa-idha intahat qadiyyati did dar al-nashr al-Israiliyya bi-ilzamihi bi-daf tawid madi sa-atabarrau bihi lil-Filastiniyyin’ (11.11.2010): www.youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID=302402 (accessed June 2012).

4 The West within the East: Israel as a role model in liberal thought In Benjamin Zeev Herzl’s utopian novel Old-New Land (Altneuland in the original German, or Tel Aviv in the first Hebrew translation), published in 1902, German aristocrat Kingscourt returns to Palestine in 1923, twenty years after a short visit there on his way to a lonely island in the Pacific Ocean. Kingscourt is amazed to discover the immense positive impact Jewish immigration has had on Palestine. It has become a modern country and paragon of social justice in which a plurality of faiths prosper peacefully. As Kingscourt crosses the Kishon Bridge, passing swiftly through ‘luxuriant orange and lemon groves, whose red and yellow fruit gleamed through the foliage’, he is ecstatic: ‘Devil take me!’ he cries, ‘But this is Italy!’1 Reschid (Rashid) Bey, ‘a handsome man of thirty five […]’ wearing ‘dark European clothing and a red fez’, educated in Berlin and a participant in the exemplary socio-economic enterprise established by the Jewish inhabitants of the country under Ottoman sovereignty,2 tells Kingscourt about the considerable benefits Arabs have gained from Zionism. Reschid explains that ‘nothing could have been more wretched than an Arab village at the end of the nineteenth century. The peasants’ clay hovels were unfit for stables. The children lay naked and neglected in the streets, and grew up like dumb beasts.’ But now, thanks to the Jewish settlement, ‘everything is different […] these people are better off than at any time in the past. They support themselves decently, their children are healthier and are being taught something. Their religion and ancient customs have in no wise been interfered with. They have become more prosperous – that is all.’ Kingscourt still finds all of this hard to believe. ‘You are queer fellows, you Muslims,’ he insists. ‘Don’t you regard these Jews as intruders?’ To this Reschid Bey replies: ‘You speak strangely, Christian. Would you call a man a robber who takes nothing from you, but brings you something instead? The Jews have enriched us. Why should we be angry with them? They dwell among us like brothers. Why should we not love them? […] excuse my saying so, but I did

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not learn tolerance in the Occident. We Muslims have always had better relations with the Jews than you Christians.’3 These words, in themselves, shatter the common perception that Herzl ignored the existence of an Arab population in Palestine, or paid no heed to the possibility that Arabs would view Zionist ambitions negatively. However, his utopia also reflected an imperialist mindset unable to perceive that the treasures of modernity brought by European settlers would not make them welcome. Visionary as he was, Herzl utterly failed to envisage the response of Palestinian society and the Arab world as a whole to the Zionist enterprise. From the beginning of the century the Zionists were largely regarded as usurping colonialists and, by the late 1930s, resistance to their enterprise vastly limited their freedom to operate. But Herzl was not entirely wrong. As Zionist settlements began to flourish across the country, Arab journalists of liberal orientation did not shy from expressing their appreciation of the modern structures and ways of thinking established by the Jewish European migrants. Reports and analyses in the liberal media almost never went as far as regarding Zionism as a legitimate idea or the Jews as welcome arrivals; they did, however, show a measure of sympathy and admiration for what the Zionists had achieved and, based on the evaluation of those achievements, argued that the realization of Zionist ambitions was feasible. Liberal writers called on the Palestinians – and the Arabs in general – to follow the examples set by the Zionists in the application of advanced agricultural methods, urban planning and scientific, rationalist education. They were impressed with the generally vibrant spirit of entrepreneurship demonstrated by the Zionists. The revival of the Hebrew language was particularly venerated because it reflected liberal efforts to revive the Arabic language. These impressions of Zionist qualities that the liberals had introduced to Arab societies since the late nineteenth century echoed beyond liberal circles; as was demonstrated in Chapter 2, they were a source of information on the Palestine issue for Rashid Rida and thus, indirectly, impacted also on the evolution of the dual approach to Zionism that is still prevalent in Islamist circles today. Examples vary. Filastin, a twice-weekly Jaffa-based newspaper owned by two Christian cousins, Yusuf al-Isa and Isa al-Isa, began publication in 1911 and was outspokenly anti-Zionist.4 It nevertheless published articles praising the revival of the Hebrew language and the agricultural achievements in Zionist settlements. In 1912, an article reprinted from a Turkish newspaper acknowledged the ‘shining achievement’ of the Hebrew language that ‘in recent years rose from the grave’. The article noted that Hebrew had become the language used in schools, even in the

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teaching of the ‘high sciences’, as well as in homes, and predicted that, given the determination of the Jewish nation, Hebrew would regain its past glory.5 A year later, a report on a Zionist annual fair in the town of Rehovot noted that the advanced agricultural products displayed, with Zionist flags hovering above them, made the Palestinian agricultural products look poor.6 The editor of al-Hilal, Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), was a keen observer of the Zionist phenomenon. Zaydan, a Christian born in Beirut who had settled in Cairo in 1886, popularized modern sciences and philosophies, authored studies and novels on Muslim and Arab history from a secularnationalist point of view and vastly contributed to the development of the Arab ethnic national identity; due to his editorial and business skills, his was the most widely circulated of the highbrow journals published by Syrian nationals in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 In 1913 he published a detailed essay on the history of the Zionist idea and the strategies employed by the Zionist movement (this essay was reprinted six months later by al-Manar).8 Featuring a photo of Herzl and focusing on the financial and educational activities of the Zionists, particularly their revival of the Hebrew culture and language, the essay noted that ‘the reader may wonder why [the Zionist] call succeeded in such a short time, but when informed about the objective and the means [applied by the Zionist], the matter will become clear’.9 Zaydan’s interest in Zionism prompted him to travel to Palestine shortly before his death in 1914. He was greatly impressed, and his account could easily be confused with textbook Zionist propaganda. In particular he was taken by the newly established Tel Aviv, which he described as being erected on a ‘piece of barren land’ using the most advanced technologies. He depicted its clean and spacious streets, sewage system, perfected houses whose gardens were surrounded by iron fences and the gymnasium that taught the ‘high sciences’ in Hebrew. Zaydan noted that whereas in Cairo the Jews lived in secluded, dirty neighbourhoods, in Palestine the tables had turned, and now they were richer than the Arabs, owned the more productive orchards and lived in the grandest homes. He wrote that while the Palestinian Arabs complained about the Zionists, the Ottoman government was preoccupied with other matters, and even if it was not, there was nothing it could do to correct the situation, because the Jews were buying Arab lands in lawful ways. Zaydan’s conclusion was that a Jewish triumph in Palestine was ‘crystal clear’. True to the liberal-rationalist spirit, he cautioned that if nothing was done, the Jews would soon take over the entire land. He called on the Palestinians to stop complaining and to start emulating the scientific methods of cultivating the land that were employed by the Zionists.10

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Some Arab liberals went as far as adopting the approach of pragmatic Zionism, which suggested that the land belonged to those who developed it rather than to its original inhabitants. Journalist and intellectual Shibli Shumayl (1853–1917), another Christian Lebanese immigrant to Egypt and a propagator of a materialist, rationalistic-scientific approach,11 proclaimed in the title of an article that he published on 1 May 1914 in the liberal journal al-Muqattam that ‘the land is the inherited property of the industrious’. In the spirit of his approach, which cherished scientific and technological progress and avoided religious and nationalistic slogans, he explained that in a quarrel over the ownership of land there is no place for historical arguments. If the Arabs claim that the Zionists are foreign invaders who have attacked them and stolen their land, then Jews can make the same claim, since they maintain that the land was taken from them by brute force. Therefore, Arab protests against Zionism are no different than the ‘crying of children’. The Zionists wish to reclaim the estates of their forefathers through actions that will enrich the country, and to transform ruins into cities and fertile land into gardens, fostering praise from generations to come. The Arabs, who have wrung the land dry, should not act violently toward its builders because this constitutes a sin against its building and the land itself. Out of concern for their honour and for the land, the Arabs should replace their protests with an even-tempered struggle with the Jews and compete with them ‘in building, learn from them, and thank them for serving as a school, teaching us how to build our land’.12 Shumayl’s article was perceived as pro-Zionist and earned him sharp criticism from Egyptians and Palestinians alike.13 The constant development of the Zionist enterprise in the decade following the publication of the article, and in particular its success in obtaining British recognition of the ambition to build a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, proved right his and others’ warnings. The 30 March 1925 editorial of al-Ahram was dedicated to the preparations for the inauguration ceremony of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which newly appointed cabinet member in the British Conservative government Lord Balfour and President of the Egyptian University Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid were to attend. As we recall from the previous chapter, the participation of al-Sayyid, the father of Egyptian liberalism, caused a controversy in his country, even though he did not hold an official political position at the time. Nevertheless, the focus of the editorial was different; it regarded the founding of the first Hebrew University as a historic occasion that epitomized the reasons for the prowess of Zionism and ushered in the return of the dead Hebrew language to the family of living languages and the birth of a new nation.

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The article stated that when Lord Balfour toured Zionist villages in Israel, he would encounter groups of Jews from all over the world who had come to fulfil his declaration of the establishment of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’. In contrast, in other parts of the country he would see Arabs who boycotted him and his declaration, yet did nothing toward the realization of their rights, aside from beseeching God to turn the tide. Zionism, according to the writers of the editorial, had begun as an abstract goal, continued as a premeditated policy and evolved into a tangible reality that could not be ignored. Arabs enjoyed greater international stature than did the Zionists; they were the inhabitants and owners of the land coveted by the Zionists and had been given the opportunity, not afforded to the Zionists, to establish armies and independent states. Nevertheless, their standing was in decline, while Zionism was moving forward. The secret of Zionist power did not lie in the mere publication of the Balfour Declaration, but in the capabilities and actions of the Zionist movement. The blame for the events transpiring in Palestine should be directed neither at the English, who primarily guarded their own interests, nor at the Zionists, who demanded a homeland for those without one, but, rather, at the Arabs, who rested on their laurels and squandered any opportunity presented to them, despite their acquaintance with Zionist dreams since their inception. The article concluded with the following statement: A day will come when the Palestinians will be awakened from their negligence, experience the facts first hand, and explore the elements that have elevated Zionism to its current stature. They will consider the power factors they have neglected thus far, which will strengthen their position in the East and the West, and they will realize how to repel the danger hovering over them. Nations who long to fulfil their goals can find in the inauguration of the Hebrew University a shining example of the benefits of activeness and assiduousness, and learn a saddening lesson from the quiet Arab protest as to the fate of nations that avoid acting and neglect their rights. If there is a nation that should learn the lesson from the inauguration of the Hebrew University then it is the Palestinian nation. True, it is a painful lesson, but at the same time, a worthwhile one.14

The vital qualities of the Zionist enterprise, identified by the authors of the article, corresponded to those that Egyptian liberals had wished to adopt at the apex of the liberal ‘golden age’: choosing activism over passivity and building a national culture as a key to establishing an independent nation. From a historical perspective the article was almost prophetic. As it predicted, a Hebrew nation was created, and its creation brought about the destruction of a society whose political organization

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and cultural cohesion were inferior. Furthermore, the causes of Zionist success became to some Palestinians, albeit belatedly, ‘a shining example of the benefit that lies in activeness and assiduousness’. Liberals in the early twentieth century pointed to the Zionist enterprise as a role model because it gave credibility to their focus on the need to absorb modern sciences and technologies, to revive the Arabic language and to discard a culture of passivity. As the years passed and Israel was established and became a viable political fact, militarily, economically and technologically prosperous, Arab liberals discovered additional elements in Zionist history and the development of Israeli society that they wished to introduce (or reintroduce) into Arab societies, including the prosperity of democracy in the light of political and security crises, the limited roles of the religious establishment, the skilled recruitment of international support and a pragmatic foreign policy. The role of Zionism and Israel as examples to follow in contemporary liberal thought was similar to their role in Islamist thought, in the sense that liberals utilized descriptions of Israel and Zionism to support arguments about the changes that were needed in Arab societies. However, while Islamists portrayed certain Zionist and Israeli institutions and values as distorted reproductions of Islamic values that they wished to reinstate, Zionist institutions and values were described by liberals (in a manner characteristic of liberal thought) as representing their own essence. The depiction of certain facets of Zionist society as shining examples of the positive virtues of the West implied that similar experiments in the Middle East might also be successful and that pluralistic, rationalistic and democratic Arab societies could be established. While the notion of Israel as a role model had been part of the Arab liberal discourse since the aftermath of the 1948 war, it began to flourish only in the 1990s. Six reasons account for its proliferation at that time. Firstly, Arab liberal thought was largely dormant in the 1950s and 1960s and still hesitant in the two decades that followed, meaning that the potential number of liberal references to Israel was limited in those periods. Secondly, in areas of importance to contemporary Arab liberals – namely political pluralism, the independence of the judiciary and scientific and technological development – Israel received international recognition mainly from the 1990s onward. Thirdly, the age of diplomatic negotiations heralded by the Madrid Conference made it easier for some liberals to portray Israel as a role model. It also made it easier for those wishing to visit Israel and experience it at first hand to do so. Fourthly, the penetration of the internet and satellite television into Arab societies rendered diverse depictions of Israel more accessible to those demonstrating an interest in it. Fifthly, the internet has significantly increased

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the number of platforms that enable the expression of challenging avantgarde notions; some of the most daring manifestations of Israel as a role model have been made by Arab bloggers, both highly and less popular, who serve as their own editors and censors. Sixthly, in Arab countries and in their diasporas a generation has come of age that has experienced Israeli–Arab wars only through history books; this generation has evolved intellectually in a reality that tilts between limited violent conflicts and festive peace ceremonies. In such a reality, perspectives that also saw the positive in Israel and dared to suggest it as a role model have developed more easily. Contemporary liberals have framed Israel and Zionism as role models in two ways. The more common frame elucidates examples worthy of imitation in Zionist history and Israeli existence only in the context of broader discussions. Those texts demonstrate, even if to a lesser degree than their Islamist counterparts, the inconvenience associated with relying on Israel as a role model, or at the very least, the understanding that many readers may reflect negatively on such reliance. Appearing mainly in the writing of thinkers born in the 1980s and of exiles, the other form of discussions centre on the analysis of Zionism and Israel as role models, not hesitating to use expressions such as the ‘admiration of Israel’ or ‘pro-Israel’. This form is unique to liberal thought and does not have equivalents in other Arab discourses. Liberal writing on Zionism and Israel as role models, much like its rival counterpart in Islamist writing, does not necessarily teach about the subject per se but, rather, demonstrates the worldview of its writers. The liberals have structured their arguments to concur with their ideological goals, which on occasion inevitably results in a reduction of complex issues. Thus, if Islamists highlight the religious nature, fervour and cohesion of Israelis, liberal writing tends to overlook the religious issue, and when it does refer to it, emphasizes the limited role of religion and religious figures in the Israeli political arena. In liberal thought Israel is fundamentally a secular, modern, rationalistic and pragmatic country – a depiction that might leave some Israelis bewildered. Writers who glorify Israel refrain from discussing incidents of discrimination or marginalize their importance, do not examine missed foreign policy opportunities and neglect to deal with heated public discussions within Israel on national priorities, socio-economic gaps and infrastructure debacles. The rift between ‘peace camp’ liberals and those belonging to the ‘refusal camp’ is manifested in some of the writing on Israel and Zionism as role models. Although neither camp demonstrates any hesitation in viewing Israeli society as a role model in certain fields, ‘peace camp’ liberals are more inclined to consider Israel as an example. Liberal

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proponents of peace and normalization sometimes emphasize Israeli achievements as part of an inclination – implicit or explicit – to grant it a new, more balanced and at times endearing image. Some find Israel’s merits as reason in and of itself to recognize its right to exist and regard it as a country whose qualities might assist other countries in the region in their transition toward modernity. The historical linkage between Israel and the West, and the accompanying benefits the Zionist movement has earned through this linkage since its inception, are used by the ‘peace camp’ to solidify its pragmatic political stance according to which Arab countries should secure their relations with Western powers in accordance with their interests and not their desires, and taking into account their own limitation of power. On the other hand, the ‘refusal camp’ differentiates between the need to study, in a reserved manner, some of Israel’s achievements, and adherence to the struggle against the depraved moral essence it represents. The adoption of elements of Israeli society is not designed to promote closer relations, but to allow Arab societies to grow stronger in order to stand up to the Zionist adversary both politically and militarily. This chapter discusses the historical roots of liberal writing about Zionism and Israel as a role model; liberal thinkers’ usage, particularly since the 1990s, of the different achievements of Israeli society as a means to shed light on the political, social and scientific revolutions necessary for Arab societies; and the manner in which the construction of Israel in liberal literature has coincided with the emphases of different liberal thinkers.

The advantages of democracy over tyranny Israel’s robust democracy has been the major factor driving its image as a role model by liberal thinkers. The focus on Israeli political culture is, however, relatively new. It was not expressed after 1948 because the defeated regimes of Egypt and Syria were democracies at the time (albeit failing and deteriorating), whereas Israeli democracy was led by an uncontested hegemonic ruling party and a founding father-figure. The democratic nature of Israel did not receive attention after the 1967 defeat either, perhaps due to the minimal liberal writing in the post-war years and its hesitant and cautious nature. The shift in Arab liberal thought began in the 1980s as liberal authors started to connect the lack of democracy in Arab societies and their backwardness. They utilized Israel’s democratic tradition as a role model both to highlight the moral advantage of democracy over tyranny

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and to prove democracy’s importance and contribution to social and military robustness. One of the first to suggest Israel as a role model was Egyptian psychologist Muhammad Shalan (b. 1937), head of the Psychiatric Department at al-Azhar University between 1975 and 1990. In the first years of the Egyptian–Israeli peace agreement he was prominently known for his call for dialogue with Israeli society, hosted Israelis in his home, participated alongside Israelis in international symposiums dealing with the conflict and visited Israel.15 He emphasized Israel’s merits in order to support his attempts to replace the perception of it as the epitome of Western evil with a more objective one, suitable to its newly found role as a partner in peace. He testified that his writing praising Israeli democracy enabled him to identify the flaws in the Egyptian democratic experience and to deal with its deficiencies in a constructive manner; much like a Japanese martial arts expert who uses his opponent’s momentum to his advantage. In a book that he published in 1981 he enumerated Israel’s advantages such as its plurality of parties; independent newspapers; objective institutions, including a judiciary that on occasion rules in favour of Arab citizens and against the government; and the ability to uphold freedom of speech even during times of war.16 In November 1983, at a conference on ‘The Democratic Crisis in the Arab Homeland’ organized by the Center for Arab Unity Studies in Limassol, Cyprus, Sad al-Din Ibrahim explained why the flourishing of democracy in Israel has raised the issue of the future of democracy in Arab societies. The conference dealt with the question whether Western democracy is suitable for Arab societies and whether the lack of political freedom is the reason for Arab degeneration. Several participants repudiated the democratic slogans boasted by radical regimes and demanded unequivocal political democracy. In that vein, when summarizing the conference, Ibrahim maintained that a number of Arab regimes had for years justified the lack of democracy by the need to prepare for the grand campaign for the liberation of Palestine and other occupied Arab lands. These regimes were utilizing the struggle against Israel to excuse their political monopoly; however, the fact that the foe had defeated those regimes time and again without compromising its own democracy had not eluded many Arabs. Much as the Arab regimes had lost credibility in regard to this issue, they had also lost it over other excuses, such as that democracy should be put on hold in favour of ‘development’, or ‘Arab unity’, or ‘the struggle against a foreign invasion’.17 In March 1983 the Kahan Commission published its conclusions following an investigation into the indirect responsibility of Israeli officials for the massacre in the Palestinian Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The findings were described by several Arab journalists as a

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façade of democracy designed to embellish Israel’s evil conduct in world public opinion, deny collective responsibility and blame a scapegoat, Defence Minister Ariel Sharon.18 Egyptian journalist and satirist Mahmud al-Sadani (1928–2010) thought otherwise. In an article in the Kuwaiti daily newspaper al-Siyasya, he pointed to the difference between Sharon’s impeachment and the Arab tradition according to which the people pay the price for their leaders’ failures. The reason, he sarcastically claimed, was that Arab countries maintain ‘sublime’ values and traditions. A manager who errs becomes a minister, a minister who blunders becomes the prime minister, and a security guard who steals becomes the head of the security company. Israel, on the other hand, removes a transgressing minister from office, indicts officials who have gone astray and is not afraid to admit its shortcomings. Here lies the secret to Israel’s victories over the Arabs: it eradicates any blight from the system, whereas Arabs let it fester in their bones.19 In the 1990s, more liberals prioritized the advantages of Israeli democracy on their agenda, aiming to highlight the need for the democratization of Arab societies. Scholars of democratization will remark that only in 1992, when the Labor Party won the general election, marking the second full governmental shift in power in Israeli history, did Israel ‘officially’ become a stable democracy. The Egyptian Wafd party was re-established in 1978 under the name ‘The New Wafd’, only to be outlawed several months later due to its criticism of Sadat. Returning to operation in its new form after his assassination, in 1984 it ran for the first time for election to the People’s Assembly and was one of a number of small opposition parties whose activities were permitted by the Mubarak regime, as long as their influence remained marginal. Upon learning of the election of Labor’s dovish Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister of Israel, Ali Salama (d. 2001), a prominent Wafd member and a veteran of the historical Wafd party, published an article entitled ‘An Important Lesson from Israel’. He wrote that as much as Arabs are hostile to [outgoing Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak] Shamir and his erroneous policies toward the Arabs and the Palestinian people, we must not hesitate to credit him, since his government conducted and oversaw this entire election. In exemplary fashion, this man has demonstrated his unequivocal faith in democracy and in the right of his people to choose its leaders out of sheer free will, without forgery or patronage. At the same time he has proved that Israel – its people and its rulers – is a self-respecting country that does not disrespect its citizens.

According to Salama, Shamir deserved honourable mention in the ‘book of praises and glory’ of democracy for the list of differences

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between Israeli and Egyptian elections: the Israeli government did not intervene in the election in favour of its party’s candidates, as did the Egyptian government to secure the National Democratic Party a false majority; the Israeli voter was not exposed to the intimidation, promises or threats experienced by the Egyptian voter; the voting slips in Israel were not damaged, as was the case in most voting booths in Egypt; Israeli voters did not vote more than once using false names, as frequently happened in Egypt; the Israeli electoral register did not include emigrants who had left the country, soldiers and the deceased, as was the case in Egypt; the Israeli opposition was not denied entrance to the election committee headquarters by the ruling party, as in Egypt; Israeli authorities did not force opposition candidates to withdraw from the election as the Egyptian government did; Shamir did not seek to add independent candidates to his party after the results came out in order to gain more seats, as the governing party in Egypt did; and the ruling Likud Party did not prohibit the assembly of opposition candidates, as did the Egyptian ruling party with emergency acts.20 Another Wafdist article in this vein wondered when Egyptian elections would parallel the Israeli ones, in which twenty-five parties participated, three of them Arab, and no claims of fraud were made.21 The writing of other liberals from the mid-1990s depicted Israeli democracy as the absolute opposite of Arab tyranny, and as proof that a state of war does not excuse the suspension of political pluralism. Egyptian Ali Salim, who travelled to Israel in his private car in 1994 and published his experiences in a book (see also Chapter 3), witnessed the political debate about a possible withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for peace with Syria. Those were tremulous days and he relished them. In one of the amusing scenes in his book he describes how, due to the broken English of the activist distributing political stickers at an intersection in the coastal city of Netanya, he was led to accidently post on the window of his Egyptian car the hawkish slogan ‘The People are with the Golan’, which he mistook for a call in favour of the ‘land for peace’ principle. Despite the embarrassing misunderstanding, the personality of the activist, who was similarly tolerant of those drivers not agreeing with his politics, impressed Salim, who wished that Egyptian children could also be taught that every man has a right to express different views and beliefs. To him, the Israeli political reality seemed a negation to the ‘one party’ and ‘one opinion’ culture prevalent in Arab societies, a culture that superficially masks profound contradictions that are bound to erupt sooner or later.22 Khalis Jalabi (b. 1945), a Syrian Kurdish Saudi-based doctor specializing in blood vessel surgery, is a prolific liberal writer and columnist

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in his spare time. His writing emphasizes the necessity of rationality, religious tolerance and democracy to Arab societies. In a book that he published in 1998, he compared Israel to the thermometer of the Arab world, an indicator of the state of its condition, weakness and helplessness. The prescription he suggested for curing the illness included a list of domestic reforms, among which were the creation of a civil society, dissolution of the emergency decrees, limitations on the role of security apparatuses, extrication from the financial crisis and empowerment of the Arab peoples.23 At the end of the Israeli ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, which aimed to crush the second intifada in 2002, he praised the right granted to Israelis to criticize their military and the prime minister. He noted with appreciation that hundreds of Israeli officers had signed a petition against their prime minister, Ariel Sharon, without fear of persecution, whereas if Arab officers did the same they would risk a death sentence. He also mentioned that in 1982, following the Sabra and Shatila massacre, hundreds of thousands of Israelis had demonstrated against the minister of defence at the time, Ariel Sharon, while no demonstrations of this scale were permitted in any of the Arab capitals. To him it served as proof that Israel was tolerant toward its people, albeit ferocious toward its external enemies.24 A seminal notion in the 1999 book by Amin al-Mahdi in favour of ‘The Other Opinion’ is the existence of a tragic alliance between antidemocratic forces in Arab societies who call for the annulment of the peace agreement, and the proponents in Israel of a state spanning from ‘the sea to the river’. A state of war serves tyranny on the Arab side and those opposing a resolution of the conflict on the Israeli side. In this context, al-Mahdi highlighted a fundamental gap between Israel and Egypt. While Israel, against the background of war, has established a democracy that since its inception has included its Arab citizens, ‘Egyptians had to live for most of the latter half of the twentieth century under emergency decrees and other restricting laws. Masked behind the slogan of the struggle against Israel, Egyptian society has lost its ability to take any sort of initiative.’25 A more radical version of admiration for Israeli democracy developed in the writing of a handful of liberals in the first decade of the 2000s. These liberals regarded democracy as the only criterion for evaluating Israel and thus rendered Israel their unequivocal support. An example can be found in the writing of Maikel Nabil Sanad, an Egyptian Copt born in 1985 and a veterinarian by profession, who considers himself pro-Israel because of the values the country represents. ‘The question for me is not who is Jewish and who is Muslim, or who is Arab and who is Hebrew’, he wrote, ‘the question is who is a democrat and who

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is a tyrant, who is a liberal and who is despotic. Therefore, my position that supports Israel signifies standing for the values of democracy and modernity that Israel represents in the region.’26 Sanad was among the most daring of Egyptian activists in the decade prior to the ousting of Mubarak. He was an activist in the al-Ghad party and the 6 April Youth Movement (the Facebook group whose struggles in 2008 were among the stimulants of the revolution in Egypt). In 2006 he started a blog where he published hundreds of articles, some of which were published in Arab newspapers and on liberal websites. In April 2009 he formed a Facebook group that called for the termination of compulsory military service in Egypt, and between November 2009 and November 2010 he successfully struggled to obtain an exemption for himself from enlisting to military service. On his blog he defined himself as secular, capitalist, feminist, pro-West, atheist, materialist, realist, pacifist, as well as pro-Israel and a proponent of peace and normalization with Israel. One of his main justifications for refusing service in the Egyptian army was his apprehension that as an Egyptian soldier he might have to direct his weapon at an Israeli soldier defending his country’s right to exist. He achieved much of his fame when he became the first freedom-of-speech prisoner after the 25 January revolution. In April 2011 he was sentenced to three years in prison for an article in which he questioned the intentions of the Egyptian army to promote democratization in the country, but was released on the first anniversary of the revolution, following Western pressure and a hunger strike.27 Sanad, inspired by the writing of Amin al-Mahdi,28 is an advocate of the two-state solution. A month and a half prior to the revolution, he published an article entitled ‘Why I Support Israel’, in which he compared the dire state of democracy in Egypt to its flourishing in Israel. In the article he demonstrated his enthusiasm for Israel’s ability to conduct eighteen parliamentary elections since 1949, without military coups, accusations of fraud and outrageous support of 99.99 per cent for any of the candidates. This in contrast to the governmental instability in Egypt, which is symbolized by the Free Officers’ Revolution, Abd al-Nasser’s and Sadat’s hold on power until the day they died and, similarly, Mubarak’s control over Egypt for thirty years without the Egyptian people’s realizing how to oust him. To Sanad, democracy is intrinsic to the Israeli DNA and was manifested in all its glory in the character of its first prime minister: David Ben Gurion, who is considered by many the founder of the State of Israel, and who was the one to declare its independence and serve as its interim president for only two days until he passed the first presidency on

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to Chaim Weizmann, did not embalm himself in his seat as many Muslim and Arab presidents do […] on the contrary, he gave up his seat more than once, even though he served as the Prime Minister of Israel […] throughout his lifetime, Ben Gurion held numerous positions that he left after short periods of time and with a smooth transition of power. Did you see an Arab president relinquishing his office that easily? What will you say about the founder of a state that gives up its presidency after two days and the prime ministry after six years? Does such a democracy not deserve our proper respect?29

Israeli democracy: aspects worthy of imitation In liberal literature, diverse elements of Israeli democracy have been portrayed as worthwhile models for Arabs to follow. These include the status of the Arab minority in Israel, the independence of the judiciary, the limited role of religion within the state, the subjugation of the government to the will of the voter and its concern for its citizens. As has been the case in Islamist thinking, the representation of certain facets of Israeli reality as a role model has at times resulted in their idealization. Even avid patriotic Israelis would read some of these extolling texts as unbalanced; and yet, multi-faceted realities did not necessarily guide the authors, but, rather, a vision that they sought to present to their countries. To many critics, Israel, even within the 1948 borders, is not a true democracy because of its definition as a ‘Jewish state’ and the innate discrimination against Arab Israelis in some aspects of its laws. For instance, Edward Said compared the discrimination in Israel to apartheid, concluding that Israel is not a liberal state and does not grant equal rights to its Arab citizens.30 Others concur with his view.31 Contrary to that stance, in works analysing the reasons for Israeli success, Arab liberals have chosen to highlight the rights bestowed on the Arab citizens of Israel and compare them with the grim state of civil rights in Arab countries. Amin al-Mahdi has written that Israel is a ‘racist’ and ‘discriminating’ country for the Arabs residing there, but also mentions that it is a democratic country where Arabs can conduct non-violent struggle for their rights, refuse to do military service and decide whether or not they wish to participate in the civil service. He emphasizes that Arabs in Israel serve as deputy ministers, deputy heads of Parliament, Supreme Court Justices and ambassadors.32 Iraqi-German author and journalist Najm Wali (b. 1956) published a book describing his first two visits to Israel in 2006 and 2007. After his

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imprisonment by Saddam Hussein’s security forces, Wali was released in 1980, immigrated to Hamburg and finally settled in Berlin. The contrast between the ethnically derived murders in Iraq and what he perceived as tolerance existing between Jews and Arabs in Israel left a deep impression on him. He found in Haifa a democratic city that upholds the rights of the Arab minority, in Nazareth a model for peaceful reconciliation of Jewish–Arab disagreements, in the village of Abu Ghosh a symbol of Jewish–Arab coexistence based on economic cooperation and in the Golan Heights an area of land whose Druze inhabitants firmly refuse to return to Bathist Syrian sovereignty. Wali argues that there is no comparison between the liberties enjoyed by the Arab Israelis and those of Arabs in Arab countries. He wonders whether Arab countries’ prohibition on visiting Israel is due to their fear that their citizens might draw the necessary comparative observations as to their own realities. His impression of the gap between the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Palestinians in the Palestinian Authority is that it cannot be measured by the sixty-year span that separates the two groups, but in ‘light years’. Arab Israelis enjoy their rights as citizens, express their opinions freely, practise their religion’s customs and decrees without interference, choose their representatives for the local authorities and the Parliament and form their own political parties.33 Coptic Maikel Nabil Sanad was overwhelmed when a female Arab Israeli friend told him that children in Arab schools in Israel are allowed to finish school early during the month of Ramadan. ‘All my life in Egypt I was forced to take exams on my holidays’, he wrote, ‘that represents the disparity in the state of religious minorities in Egypt and in Israel.’34 Syrian columnist and playwright Thair al-Nashif (b. 1982) was forced into exile in Cairo in 2007, following his criticism of the Assad regime. His 2010 play The Shadow of a Dictator was a premonition of the collapse of the Arab tyrannies. Al-Nashif wondered why Arabs in Israel, in which he also included ‘Arab Jews’, i.e., Jews who have migrated from Arab countries, are more industrious than Arabs in other Middle Eastern countries. In his opinion, the determining factors that explain this phenomenon are the advantages of Israel over the Arab countries: democracy; accountability of officials to the law; the freedoms of thought, expression and faith; and equality regardless of sex, race or nationality.35 A female Palestinian columnist who lives in Ramallah and publishes articles on liberal websites, Zaynab Rashid, maintains that proof of the Zionist state’s advantage over its enemies lies in the refusal of the Arab citizens of Israel to relinquish the privileges associated with their Israeli citizenship, as well as in the influx of Muslims living outside of Israel

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to its borders, in the hope of obtaining these privileges. In a July 2010 article she mentions the tremendous efforts of Palestinian and Egyptian citizens in striving to obtain Israeli identity cards and passports through marrying women within the 1967 borders, the outright refusal of the inhabitants of Jerusalem to surrender their Israeli identity card in favour of a Palestinian one and the willingness of many Sudanese, Eritrean and Somali citizens to risk their lives by infiltrating into Israel in the hope of fleeing the anguish of their countries and gaining a chance for a better future.36 Journalist Faysal al-Qasim (b. 1961), the host of al-Jazeera’s flagship programme The Opposite Direction and a vocal representative of the liberal ‘refusal camp’, argues that Arab regimes have killed more Arab civilians than Israel has in all of its wars. He writes that, unlike tyrannical Arab regimes, Israel does not deny its Palestinian adversaries food, electricity, telephone connections and medical aid; as opposed to their counterparts in Arab countries, the majority of the time Arab citizens of Israel have been allowed to demonstrate, and even when the Israeli police have dispersed them, they have not clubbed the demonstrators to death. ‘If we compare the Israeli treatment of Raid Salah (head of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel) and the manner in which some Arab tyrants treat their opponents’, writes al-Qasim, ‘we will be horrified to discover that the Israelis are much less brutal.’ Furthermore, ‘Israel can always claim [in its defence] that it is facing an enemy, whereas Arab tyrants face their peoples.’37 Another facet of Israeli democracy that serves as a role model is the power of the judiciary and other authorities to hold politicians and generals to account, to summon them to commissions of inquiry, indict them, try them in court and subsequently jail them if found guilty. Common in liberal writing is the depiction of Israel as a country to be envied because all of its citizens are equal before the law, including those in the highest echelons of power, as opposed to Arab leaders who are immune from justice. An article published in al-Hayah by Dalal al-Bizri, a female Lebanese columnist, commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the nakba provides an example. In the article she laments the unfortunate discrepancy created over time between Arabs and Israel in terms of sound administration and law and order. ‘The Zionist gangs’, she writes, have become a prosperous democratic state, albeit racist and conquering, with laws and responsible institutions that demand answers from the leaders; on the other hand, Arab countries have transformed from states into gangs.38 The trial of former Israeli President Moshe Katsav, in which he was convicted of rape, ended around the time of the sweeping protests in the

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Arab world; Lebanese liberal columnist Khurshid Istanbuli suggested, in reviewing the legal affair, that the slogan ‘know thine enemy’, which Arabs adopted early on with regard to Israel, should be replaced with the slogan ‘know thine enemy and learn from it’.39 In an article published on a liberal website, the Iraqi historian Ali Ajil Manhal (b. 1951), who has resided in Germany since 1982, argued that Israel has presented the Arab world with a paragon of law and justice. Indeed, Israel is usurping Arab lands, but in domestic affairs it is a country where no one is above the law, and a country that respects its people and does not discriminate between its sons. He mentioned that one of the judges in the Katsav trial was George Qara, an Arab Israeli who lives in Haifa. Additionally, the trial took place without any government interference or media blackout, as the government insisted on the utmost transparency in order to show the world that Israel is a democratic and law-abiding state.40 Some liberals perceived the Winograd Commission that investigated the Second Lebanon War as yet another example of Israeli transparency, self-criticism and amendment. Majid Kayyali (b. 1954) is a Palestinian columnist born in Syria who writes for al-Hayah. He complained that while Israel was investigating a war that had just ended, Arabs still had not identified those responsible for the 1948 nakba, the war of 1967 and the Second Lebanon War, and had not critically examined the history of the Palestinian national movement in relation to ‘Black September’, the involvement in the Lebanese civil war, the armed struggle against Israel and the negotiations with it. ‘The meaning is’, he wrote, ‘that Israel grows stronger and develops despite its crises, corruption and failures, mainly thanks to its subjugation to the principles of transparency, accountability, examination and modification, while we grow weaker.’41 An article from 2009 by columnist Ahmad al-Sawi (b. 1978) in the Egyptian daily newspaper al-Masri al-Yawm compared the Israeli state comptroller from 2005 to 2012, Micha Lindenstrauss, to his Egyptian counterpart between 1999 and 2011, Jawdat al-Malt. Al-Sawi found that beside the fact that both men were judges, the Egyptian comptroller differs from the Israeli one in every possible way: the Israeli comptroller is appointed by an elected Parliament, he has the power to oversee all government departments and public services, he is permitted to investigate the prime minister himself, his reports can lead to a criminal investigation against those accused of corruption, he can topple the government and harm the prospects of the prime minister by exposing even an irregularity of a thousand dollars, and he is equal in stature to the prime minister and the president. The differences between the two men and the two countries derive from Israeli governmental legitimacy provided by the Israeli voter, who is the true sovereign. ‘As long as we

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are not in that state’, warned al-Sawi, ‘the gap between us and Israel will remain as immense as the gap between al-Malt and Lindenstrauss.’42 According to Islamist thought, the Jewish identity of Israel and the stature of religion in its policies are proof of the benefits reaped by not separating religion and state, as well as proof that democracy is enhanced without such a separation. The issue of religion and state in Israel has been peripheral to liberal writing, perhaps because of its problematic nature for thinkers who demand the severing of Islam from politics. Some liberals have abstained from discussing the ethno-religious character of Israel, as they recognize that it contributes to validating the Islamist preaching to conflate religion and politics.43 Other liberals have offered interpretations of the relationship between religion and state in Israel as models that Arabs should follow. Amin al-Mahdi, who wished to establish a model in the Arab world for a secular state with religion separate from the state but not from society, noted that Israeli leaders throughout the generations have mostly been secular and have tended to regard Judaism as a nationality rather than a religion.44 Maikel Nabil Sanad, the self-defined atheist, has described Israel as the only country in the Middle East where atheists can legally organize and freely voice their ideas, and he was impressed that there was no ‘religious’ affiliation listed on the Israeli identity card.45 Abd al-Rahman al-Lahabi, a Saudi columnist for the liberal website al-Hiwar al-Mutamaddin, has mentioned that Israel’s Jewishness has hindered neither its modernity nor its progression and its freedom of thought and action. In its cultural revival, Israel preceded the Arabs, who were preoccupied with issuing permits and prohibitions, because it entrusted religious matters to the hands of rabbis and did not mix them with politics. On the other hand, Arabs combined religious and secular affairs, charged anyone who attempted to separate the two with heresy, and in the end were left with no religion and no public secular life.46 The relations of religion and state are also used as an exemplar in the works of Tunisian liberal lawyer and columnist al-Afif al-Akhdar (1934–2013). Al-Akhdar was among those liberals who traversed a winding road to arrive at the ‘peace camp’. He was exiled from Tunis to Algiers in 1961, after defending an individual accused of the attempted assassination of President Habib Bourguiba. In 1966 he moved to Lebanon and grew close to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In 1979 he settled in France, which became his home, and in the 1990s he started to publish articles in al-Hayah and liberal websites.47 While in the 1970s he called for the overthrow of tyrannical Arab regimes as a means to liberate Palestine, from the 1990s onward his writing was characterized by decisive support for peace with Israel,

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a call to structure relations with it based on the limitations of power, and a harsh criticism of Islamism. In his vision, as portrayed in a 1999 al-Hayah article, the future Palestinian state will be established based on modern institutions and not on traditional tribal values. Palestine should be a country where women are not the victims of ‘tattered traditions’ and medieval customs such as honour killings; where polygamy is prohibited and both sexes are equal under the law; where the birth rate is limited; where modern education produces engineers, researchers and doctors instead of ‘bums and terrorists’. According to al-Akhdar, when establishing these staples, Palestinians will have to take heed of the Israeli example: as in Israel, they will have to distinguish between faith and citizenship and between theocracy and democracy. If the Palestinian people adopt the virtues of ‘yesterday’s enemy’, meaning the Israeli people, they will be transformed into a vanguard for the Arab nations of the Middle East, who are bound by outdated values.48 Muhammad Said al-Ashmawi (1932–2013), who served as president of the State Security Court in Egypt and was a loyalist of Sadat’s and Mubarak’s regimes, was not a textbook liberal. Yet al-Ashmawi, who retired from office only in 1993, was regarded as one of the principal opponents of the Muslim Brothers. His rejection of Islamism, much like his restrictive approach to sharia, is supported by liberal reasoning. In his book The Cultural Struggle between Arabs and Israel, he attributed the success of Zionism in attaining its goals to the ability of its founding fathers to discount the literal interpretation of religious texts in favour of urgent needs. According to al-Ashmawi’s historical narrative, Herzl and his partners, who were not devout believers, diverged from the teaching of the Talmud that rejected the man-made establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. Ben Gurion charged the IDF with the interpretation of the Bible, thus allowing reality to interpret religious scriptures, rather than religious scriptures interpreting reality. Only once the Jews had by-passed literal interpretation of their holy scriptures and deviated from the rigid stance of the rabbis were they able to fulfil the Bible’s promise for redemption of the land and create a military actuality that realizes the historic Jewish dream. In contrast, according to al-Ashmawi, Muslims – or more accurately, the Islamist component among them – assumed the opposite position. They attacked the Jews based on a selective quoting of Quranic verses that call for the annihilation of the Jews wherever they are, which resulted in a waste of resources, made it difficult for them to read reality accurately and degraded the verses of the Quran into political slogans. Al-Ashmawi emphasized that the Arab–Jewish struggle is fundamentally and principally cultural, and that the cynical exploitation of religion is despicable.

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Israel poses a cultural challenge to the Arabs. The answer to that challenge lies not in religion, but in the acceptance of modern civilization, science and rationalism.49 Common to Islamist thought is the claim that the lack of democracy (or shura) in Arab societies has enabled their leaders, unaccountable to voters, to employ reckless policies and march blindfold into military catastrophes. This perception has also been expressed in liberal thought. For example, Maikel Nabil Sanad wrote that the reliance of Israeli foreign policy on interests rather than ideology is a direct derivative of the democratic structure of Israeli politics, as opposed to the Arab reality where politicians who have gained ‘power on the back of tanks’ do as they please. To prove his point, Sanad recalled how the Likud, perceived in the Arab world as an extreme right-wing party, signed a peace treaty with Egypt that included a complete withdrawal from Sinai. In doing so, the Likud turned a cold shoulder to the notion of establishing a Jewish kingdom from the Nile to the Euphrates River that had long been attributed to the party, in favour of the Israeli interest to live peacefully among its neighbours. On the other hand, Arab politicians were unable to prioritize their people’s interest over their own antiquated ideologies, causing their subjects unnecessary anguish. Thus, for instance, Egypt refused to surrender conquered Sudanese lands and Syria remained in a state of war with Israel, despite the latter’s clear military superiority. Sanad concluded that Israel recognizes that its national interest necessitates recognition of the Arabs, while Arabs believe in the equation – ‘I exist, therefore you do not exist.’50 Similarly to Islamist writing, the deal to release kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit served liberal thinkers as a living example of the Israeli alternative social contract between a citizen and his country and a soldier and his government, which they yearned to adopt and implement. In an article that he published in a Qatari newspaper, Faysal alQasim wondered: when has an Arab regime embarked on a mission to free Arab prisoners from Israeli prisons, and when has an Arab leader visited the family members of a prisoner in an Israeli or another foreign prison and promised them to stop at nothing to achieve his release, or at least offered to console them? Al-Qasim praised the Israeli willingness ‘to reach the end of the world to save one of its citizens’, as opposed to the ‘fascist and barbaric’ treatment of defenceless citizens in Arab countries. The goal of Arab revolutions should be to free the Arab man from the yoke of tyranny and transform him into the metaphorical figure of Gilad Shalit.51 The release of more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier was not considered by liberal writers as a Hamas

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achievement, but as grim proof that the value of an Israeli citizen is indeed a thousand times higher than that of his Arab neighbour. Iqbal al-Ahmad, former head of the Kuwaiti news agency, wrote in an article entitled ‘Shalit You Are Lucky’: You know why I envy Shalit, wish to be in his stead, and congratulate him on his homeland? Because of the value of a person and his importance to his nation. In the Arab world it is the regime that kills, arrests and hides its sons and daughters underground, it is the one that runs them over with tanks and huddles them in jails […] I pray day and night that in my country I will receive the same treatment as Shalit.52

Activism and pragmatism versus a culture of passivity and myth In liberal eyes the Arab defeat of 1948 was a tragedy: the rightful owners of the land lost to the usurpers of the land, despite the Arab demographic, economic and military advantages. Islamist thinkers mitigated the disgrace of the defeat by framing it as the defeat of the enemies of Islam; the principal lessons they drew from it were the importance of pure, unifying faith and the importance of activism based on meticulous planning. Liberal thinkers also identified with the latter lesson, complementing it with others that corresponded with their worldview, such as the importance of recognizing the international balance of power. For many years, Constantine Zurayq’s 1948 book dealing with the meaning of the nakba was the sole attempt to crystallize the defeat as a liberal lesson. Zurayq, a Syrian national and avid proponent of panArab unity within a democratic, modern and secular framework, suggested several explanations for the Zionist success in establishing a state at the expense of Arab rights. The first explanation was the influence of Jews in the United States, the scope of which could be appreciated only by those living there (as previously mentioned, Zurayq had served as a Syrian diplomat in Washington, DC). Zurayq noted that numerous American financial industries and institutions were under Jewish control, as were the newspapers, radio, movie industry and the rest of the propaganda apparatuses. In addition, Jewish voters in states such as New York, Illinois and Ohio played a crucial role in close elections and the candidates sought their endorsement.53 The second explanation was the superior methods of organization and preparation employed by the Jewish side over the Arab one, which offset the territorial weakness of the Jews.54 The third explanation was the enlistment of the entire Jewish population, men and women alike, to the war effort, as opposed to the Arabs, who counted only on their regular armies.55 The fourth

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explanation was the unification of the Jews behind a single goal which promoted the integration of people who came from different countries, spoke different languages and had different customs, enabling them to achieve what seemed to be impossible. In contrast, the division of Arabs into different societies prevented them from achieving what seemed to be natural. Zurayq concluded that the Zionist ambition to survive and fight would be counterbalanced only by a similar or stronger desire: unity and loyalty would be defeated only by more robust unity and loyalty; a regime structured on a modernistic approach to citizenship would be beaten only by a regime fully armed with this perception; and the Zionist threat – as all foreign threats – would be curtailed only by a united, developed and advanced national Arab entity. He concluded that: The victory achieved by the Zionists – a victory only a blind man can refute – did not stem from the superiority of one people over another, but from the advantage of one system over another. Its cause is the Jewish roots that are entrenched in the modern Western life style, while we are still far away [from that life style] and alienate it. They live in the present and in the future, while we still dream of the past and drug ourselves with the glory days that are long gone.56

Liberal thinkers who had the privilege of examining the war with the perspective of the previous half century did not reach different conclusions from Zurayq’s. Like him, they emphasized the success of Zionism in enlisting international support, its modernistic character and unifying goal. Walid al-Khalidi (b. 1925), a Palestinian journalist who in 1963, alongside Zurayq, was among the founders of the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Beirut, dedicated to the scientific study of the conflict, postulated that in 1948 Israel had the upper hand due to its higher quality of leadership. He wrote that David Ben Gurion was not an ordinary politician but a unique leader and an example of how one man can change history. Ben Gurion excelled in maintaining a clear vision with regard to the goal of establishing a state and the means, mainly military, to attain it. He knew how to delve into meticulous details while keeping the broad picture in mind. He demonstrated a willingness to listen to experts and base his decisions on their advice. Compared to his leadership, the Arabs suffered from the lack of a unified leadership and, therefore, from the lack of a unified vision, goal and operational and military coordination.57 Sad al-Din Ibrahim thought that meticulous planning and pragmatism were what granted the ‘foreign-to-the-region’ Zionist movement its edge over the Arabs, or the ‘rightful owners and sons of the noble and

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deep-rooted nation’. That edge allowed the State of Israel not only to survive but to prosper. The Zionist movement had set itself a goal – to establish a state that would solve the problems of the Jewish diaspora. When Palestine seemed unattainable, the Zionists considered alternatives such as Argentina, Uganda and Sinai, so long as the strategic goal could be achieved. The efforts to establish a state were divided into gradual and calculated stages, and they overtook Palestinian lands lump by lump, inch by inch and acre by acre. The Zionists were not concerned with questions of principles and rights, just survival, development and expansion. In contrast to the diligence and pragmatism demonstrated by the Zionists, Arabs relied on slogans, appealing to international law and morals. They failed to realize that the imperative elements were power and interests. Nothing was covert about the Jewish plans, yet the Arabs ignored them, and even when they comprehended them after a crucial delay, they acted irrationally and indecisively.58 Egyptian columnist and television moderator Ahmad al-Muslimani (b. 1970), one of the co-founders of the liberal party al-Ghad with Ayman Nur who also favours the views of the ‘refusal camp’, emphasized the talent of the Zionists to identify shifts in the world order. When Britain was a world power on which the sun never set, they devised a way to approach London and obtained the Balfour Declaration, without which the state of Israel would never have been born. Years later, when Washington became the capital of the world, the Zionists put their fate in its hands. With the rise of unified Germany, Jewish influence within it rose as well. As opposed to Jewish dexterity in interpreting deep-seated international processes, Arab regimes coped with shifts in the international arena in a failing and delayed manner.59 To al-Muslimani, the key to safeguarding Arab rights is the great skill of navigating the waters of high diplomatic intrigue. The establishment of the State of Israel was a conspiracy against Arabs, yet intrigue is an acceptable tool in the attainment of interests and the inflicting of damage. Therefore, ‘the solution is for us to counteract with our own intrigue: diplomatic efforts will be defeated only by diplomatic efforts, reason will be defeated only by reason, interest will be defeated only by interest, and vision will be defeated only by vision. That is to say, intrigue will be defeated only by intrigue.’60 Amin al-Mahdi’s analysis, too, acknowledged the alliance between Zionism and the United States, but accentuated their shared moral identity and the Arabs’ oversight that tilted the American scales toward the Zionists. Upon realizing the emerging stature of the United States in the early 1940s, he wrote, Zionists had developed close relationships with American political institutions and created a capitalist Jewish lobby that

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was established in major cities and was well versed in the ways of each city’s local propaganda. Americans looked favourably on Zionism, due to the correlation between Zionist perceptions and their own heritage: the creation of a ‘new world at the heart of the old world’, that serves as a melting pot of ethnic and cultural groups of immigrants, and the building of a modern and democratic state. Contrary to Zionism, Arabs represented something incomprehensible to Americans, as their political terminology relied on traditions, religious hatred and adherence to the ways of the past, and their governments possessed tribal elements. Yet those facts alone were not enough to grant Zionists more than sympathy and admiration that at times translated into American aid. When several Arab states made the crucial mistake of allying with the Soviet Union during the Nasserist era, Israel won ‘suddenly and with little effort’ the valuable asset of American strategic support.61

‘Science is the solution’ The first mention of Israel as the harbinger of modernity, in contrast to Arab backwardness that wallows in the past, was in Zurayq’s 1948 book on the lessons learned from the Arab defeat. His claim is not self-evident because in its War of Independence the Jewish side hardly had a militarytechnological advantage over its opponents. Zurayq did not allude to a specific weapon or a specific military doctrine, but to what he understood as the Zionists’ choice to integrate modernity into their lives, as opposed to Arab societies’ rejection of it, which had led them to ‘a painful materialistic and moral bankruptcy on the eve of the Zionist blow’. He maintained that ‘progress is what will allow us to take part in the world in which we live – technology, separation of religion and state, sciences, the achievements of human civilization’, and warned that ‘we should not fear national progression, but seclusion in the shell we inherited’.62 He suggested a similar notion after the 1967 war, when he defined Israel as a rational state that will not be defeated until Arab countries are rational as Israel is, or more so.63 ‘Rationality’ for Zurayq included the meticulous Israeli investment in Middle Eastern studies, as well as in subjects that are unrelated to the conflict directly, like Arab literature. As he had analysed already in 1953,64 Zurayq argued after the defeat of 1967 that the iron curtain cast over those Arabs who wished to get to know the Israeli enemy hindered the preparations for war and reflected Arab leaders’ distrust in the readiness of their people to deal with reality.65 The relative scientific and technological gap that Zurayq noted to explain the nakba and the naksa has become more tangible over the

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years. Ironically, as Israel has developed into an independent power with weapons, hi-tech, aerospace and medical industries, and its achievements in those fields have positioned it at the forefront of Western progression, the results of the later rounds of violence with Arab countries and the Palestinians have become more ambiguous. This situation notwithstanding, to both ‘peace camp’ and ‘refusal camp’ liberals, the growing scientific gap has served as a warning sign and proof that a series of revolutions is necessary in the Arab world: allocation of greater resources to scientific education, basing society on rationalistic thought rather than religious mysticism, creation of gender equality and safeguarding the plurality of thought. Whereas ‘peace camp’ liberals regarded scientific reform as an opportunity to develop ties with Israel and did not avoid unrestricted manifestations of admiration for Israeli achievements, ‘refusal camp’ liberals saw reform as a prerequisite for success in the next round of hostilities and integrated forms of ­resentment into their appreciation. Sad al-Din Ibrahim first reflected on the growing technological gap between Israel and its neighbours when he watched the launch of the first Israeli satellite, Ofek 1, in 1988. For him, Arabs are not inferior to Israelis; Egypt’s scientific advancement keeping pace with Israel’s in the 1960s served as proof of that. The difference between the sides developed because Israel did not rely solely on American financial and military support and worked diligently to cultivate technologies independently, despite external debts equal in size to Egypt’s. Ibrahim concluded with the hope that the launch of the Israeli satellite would incentivize Arab leaders to think about the future of their countries, invest their resources in science, reverse the brain drain of Arab scientists and create a suitable environment for technological development that would reap fruits in a number of years.66 Khalid Muntasir (b. 1960), a dermatologist, venereology expert and one of the leading proponents of the liberal ‘refusal camp’, referred to the Israeli scientific advantage in similar terms. He argued that only a scientific revolution in the Arab world would allow it to board the ‘civilization train’ and succeed in the struggle against Zionism. Walking the line of taboo subjects is his habit. His ground-breaking show about sexuality on the Egyptian Dream channel is no stranger to discussions on masturbation, foreplay and the size of the male penis, and he edits the sex education page on the liberal website Elaph. In his books he has assailed the lack of tolerance in Arab societies toward critical thought and creativity.67 In Fubya al-Ilm (The Science Phobia), he suggests that Arabs’ inferiority derives first and foremost from their scientific inferiority. He

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emphasizes that this statement is not Zionistic propaganda but, rather, coming to terms with the bitter reality: Israelis are indeed racists and settlers who live in a terrorist country, but at the same time they are fervent proponents of science and respect the scientific method. Proof of that lies in Israel’s position as number one in research expenditure per GDP and its ranking in the top ten worldwide in the percentage of engineers, weapons export, patents, data security and hi-tech developments. The Weizmann Institute created the first Israeli computer back in 1949; while the first Arab computer has yet to be created.68 According to Muntasir, whose comparative data may be overly critical of the Arab side, one of the main reasons for the gap is the emphasis on religious studies in Arab societies, contrary to the Israeli focus on scientific education. In an article that he published in March 2009 titled ‘Israel Leads the Way in Physics while We Lead the Way in Religious Jurists’, he recalls two headlines that alarmed him: ‘Russia Purchases Drones from Israel’ and ‘India Buys a Spy Satellite from Israel’. As he understands it, Israel has become a major player in the high technology market because of its investment in education. With an annual investment of $2,500 per capita, as compared to the Arab investment of $340, Israel has produced 1,395 scientists for every million people, compared with 136 scientists per million in Arab countries. In relative terms, the number of books translated into Hebrew is thirty-three times higher than the number of translations into Arabic in Arab countries, and in Israeli kindergartens (so he claims) every child has a computer. ‘We will not overcome them in the realms of science, military or the economy by preaching in mosques, portraying them as monkeys and pigs and creating a preacher for every citizen and a religious jurist for every household. We will overcome them only through science.’69 The Technion, one of Israel’s leading universities, is for Muntasir the model for the revolutionary path that Arabs should take because (so he claims) its slogan, ‘Science is the solution’, is a reversal of the Muslim Brothers’ slogan, ‘Islam is the solution’. For him it is highly symbolic that the first president of the Technion became the first president of the State of Israel (in fact Chaim Weizmann was involved in the founding of the Technion but did not serve as its president). Muntasir is impressed that the Department of Computer Sciences at the Technion was founded already in the 1960s and counts among its graduates executives in companies such as Yahoo and Google.70 In an article that he wrote after the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Professor Dan Shechtman from the Technion, he defined it as the qibla (the direction of prayer in Islam) for scientists, which attracts chemists, physicists, ­engineers and computer scientists from around the world.71

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The Nobel Prizes won by Israeli scientists at the start of the twentyfirst century deeply impressed other Arab liberals as well. The prizes exacerbated the insult to a nation of 300 million people, of whom only one has won the Nobel Prize in the sciences: the Egyptian-American Ahmad Zuwayl (1999), who spent most of his research career in America. The awarding of the prize for chemistry to Professor Ada Yonath in 2009 evoked special interest, as it highlighted the gender gap between the societies. Lebanese Palestinian Jihad al-Khazin (b. 1939), the chief editor from 1988 to 1998 of al-Hayah, wrote: ‘may we live to see an Arab woman win the Nobel Prize for science one day, instead of her remaining a prisoner between the kitchen and the bedroom of her home’.72 Muwaffaq Matar, a member of Fatah and a columnist for the Palestinian daily al-Hayah al-Jadida, wrote that while the Israeli scientist researches proteins in a living cell, Arab ‘cells of ignorance, underdevelopment and extremism’ prevent opportunities for women to contribute to science, leaving them weak and subservient; and while Israel had produced the third woman in a hundred years to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry, the Arab man was busy annexing the third and fourth woman into his kingdom of patriarchal lust.73 For some liberals, Israel’s scientific achievements discredit its delegitimization. Amira Tahir, a female Egyptian columnist, operates two Facebook groups: one promotes normalization with Israel, while the other, no less scandalous group preaches atheism.74 She protested the hypocrisy of Arabs who derive pleasure from Israeli and Jewish inventions in the fields of agriculture, medicine and computers without appreciating their creators. She wrote: ‘We should feel deeply ashamed when we sit in front of the internet and curse Israel day and night on an Arab version of Windows developed in the Microsoft factory in Tel Aviv by Israeli experts.’75 Even greater admiration for Israeli scientific and technological achievements than that of Tahir was manifested by the Syrian oppositionist Farid al-Ghadri. In an article bearing the unconventional title ‘Why I Admire Israel’ he wrote that ‘While many Arabs view Israel as a sore implant [in the Middle East], I view it as a blessing.’ For al-Ghadri, a proponent of American capitalism, Israel serves as a paragon of overwhelming economic success, deemed even more impressive on the backdrop of its Arab neighbours’ resounding failure. He described the acquisition of Israeli company Iscar for four billion dollars by American investment mogul Warren Buffet as a transaction that could not have taken place in any Arab country. To him, Iranian and Islamist calls for the annihilation of Israel are the result of jealousy; they are analogous to the manager of a failing factory operating next door to a prosperous

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one who wastes his time trying to destroy the successful factory instead of investing his time in learning from it and imitating it.76 Ali Salim merged the call for a scientific revolution in the Arab world with a suggestion that the conflict between Israel and its neighbours should shift to a competition for technological excellence that is not malicious and serves as a goal in and of itself. Typical of the ‘liberal peace’ camp, he described normalization as exchanging a bloody struggle for a constructive one that focuses the Arab efforts on investing in areas in which they lag behind. He suggested that as part of the process Arabs would visit Israeli factories and study their methods of operation, and claimed that if the visitors were deservedly overcome by envy when they discovered that the extent of Israeli manufacturing surpassed the Arab one, they should be guided by their pride to try to replicate it. As opposed to a violent conflict, this kind of peaceful competition is fine, as the only weapon used is creative and practical ideas that benefit humanity.77 Another facet of Israeli science that liberal thinkers have perceived as a benefit worth adopting is untainted, pluralistic historical research which paints an accurate picture of the past and contributes to a rationalization of the political debate in the present. Special attention has been given to the rise of the ‘New Historians’ – a group of Israeli scholars that from the 1980s, assisted by the release of classified Israeli archived documents, has offered a new historiography of the Arab–Israeli conflict and, in particular, the War of Independence, shedding light on the IDF’s involvement in the deportations of Arab inhabitants. Hazim Saghiya and Salah Bashir defined the new historical narrative devised by the New Historians as a ‘beacon of light’ and believed it should be answered by a balanced Arab historiography. Similarly to Israeli historians who questioned the founding myths of the Zionist narrative, Arab historians should re-examine the historical Arab narrative in order to create a new narrative and contribute to the creation of a peaceful future in the region. In an article they wrote for the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s independence, the two explained that the revised narrative would not be that of winners and losers but one true to history. Such a narrative would enable Arabs to rationally comprehend Israel and cope with it in a more rational manner. Saghiya and Bashir called for Arab historical research that would not stop at depicting the Zionist enterprise as a Western-promoted colonial conspiracy, but would try to ascertain the unique circumstances that have allowed Israel – as opposed to other colonialist experiments in the twentieth century – to establish an enduring political entity and society. They also recommended that Arab scholars should re-evaluate the modern history of the entire region

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as a whole, noting that Israel is not necessarily the main component of that history. Arab historical research should cease the ‘exhausting discussion’ on the legitimacy of Israel and settle for understanding it in the broad, regional context.78 Like Saghiya and Bashir, Ahmad al-Muslimani has also called for emulation of the Israeli New Historians. As a voice of the ‘refusal camp’ he does not consider the forming of such a movement an opportunity to promote understanding between Israelis and Arabs. Rather, it is a tool to undermine the stature of the Zionist movement in the international community and to promote Arab historiography, which has always been considered as ‘sentimental’ and unreliable, as compared to the Israeli one.79 Nevertheless, this is only one role he envisions for the Egyptian movement of New Historians. Additionally, their role will be to rectify the Egyptian psyche’s distorted image of the liberal chapter in Egypt’s history. According to Muslimani, the New Historians in Egypt will challenge everything not out of a desire to accuse someone of treason, and not with the ambition to take revenge, frustrate or amuse, but in order to highlight mistakes. According to al-Muslimani, historical studies about Egypt’s liberal age have reduced it to the ‘hedonistic [exploits] of the King and the escapades of the palace’, when in fact it was the era of a ‘great Egyptian nation’, a period in which Cairo surpassed Paris and witnessed the development of art, science, literature and philosophy that the world has never before seen. True, the king was corrupt and contemptible, but by no means was it the age of the king, but that of Sad Zaghlul (1859–1927, leader of the Wafd), Mustafa al-Nahhas, Taha Hussein, Talat Harb (1846–1941, an Egyptian economist), Mustafa Mushrafa (1898–1950, an Egyptian physicist at Cairo University who contributed to the development of quantum theory and the theory of relativity) and Umm Kulthum. New Egyptian historians will reveal all of this, redressing the wrong. Al-Muslimani concludes: Fools will ask: why should we dig open the graves now? What is the use in re-examining the [Free Officers] revolution and what transpired before and after it? And why should we let the world rapidly move toward the future while we entrench in memories? I believe that the objective in inaugurating the ‘New Historians’ movement is not to dig up graves for the purpose of ruining living people or splitting the political movements, which are already divided. Rather it is to revive the science of history, to increase the benefits attained from political science and to educate the young generation that there are more than two colours and two opinions.80

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Conclusion The notion of Zionism and Israel as role models that Arabs should imitate has been manifested in various ways in liberal writing. Those manifestations were inspired by the Arab liberal vision and are directly related to institutions and values that Arab liberals identify as Western: democracy, pluralism, rationalism and pragmatism. Liberals are convinced that the flourishing of Israel in numerous fields and its ability to triumph in war and survive in a hostile environment do not derive from some metaphysical explanation but from the fact that it is at its core a modern state that combats non-modern states. The tension between ‘refusal camp’ and ‘peace camp’ liberals is apparent in the writing on Israel as a role model. Like the Islamist stance, the ‘refusal camp’ regards reliance on Zionist examples as a means to improve the Arab position in the struggle with Israel. In contrast, the ‘peace camp’ views learning from Zionist examples as an opportunity for cooperation and dialogue. A handful of young Arab liberals have gone as far as viewing the liberal nature of Israel as a justification for its existence in the Middle East and a reason to openly sympathize with it.

Notes  1 T. Herzl, Old-New Land, trans. L. Levensohn (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1960), pp. 120–1.  2 Ibid., pp. 68–9.  3 Ibid., pp. 123–5.  4 A. Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 66.  5 ‘Al-Lughat fi Filastin’, Filastin (27.7.1912), pp. 1–2.  6 ‘Al-Istirad al-Sahyuni al-Kabir’, Filastin (3.5.1913), p. 3.  7 Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East, pp. 53–4.  8 ‘Al-Sihyawniyya’, al-Manar, 17 (25.4.1914), pp. 385–90.  9 ‘Al-Sihyawniyya: Ta’rikhuha wa-Amaluha’, al-Hilal, 22 (November 1913), pp. 92–8. 10 ‘Filastin: Ta’rikhuha wa-Aatharuha wa-Sa’ir Ahwaliha al-Ijtimaiyya wal-Iqtisadiyya wal-Ilmiyya’, al-Hilal, 22 (1.4.1914), pp. 513–21. 11 A. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 248–52. 12 S. Shumayl, ‘Ammiru wa-istamiru, fal-ard mirath al-mujtahid’, in Shibli Shumayl, Kitabat Siyasiyya wa-Islahiyya (Beirut: Dar al-Hamra, 1991), pp. 226–7. 13 Ibid., p. 225; H. al-Namnam, al-Tarikh al-Majhul: al-Mufakkirun al-Arab walSahyuniyya wa-Filastin (Cairo: Ruya lil-Nashr wal-Tawzi, 2007), pp. 162–3.

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14 ‘Al-Siyasa al-Yawm’, al-Ahram (30.3.1925), p. 3. 15 See also: M. Awwad, Misr wa-Israil: Khams Sanawat min al-Tatbi (Beirut: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi, 1984), pp. 210–11; ‘Conversations on peace’, Davar, Davar Hashavua (14.12.1990), in Hebrew, p. 4. 16 M. M. Shalan, Misr wal-Arab wa-Israil: Inikasat min al-Iyada al-Nafsiyya (Cairo: n.p., 1981), pp. 211–12. 17 S. A. Ibrahim, ‘Muqaddima’, in Azmat al-Dimuqratiyya fi al-Watan al-Arabi (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wahda al-Arabiyya, 2nd edition, 1987), pp. 11–14. 18 For example: A. A. Abu al-Nasr, ‘Dimuqratiyyat Israil!’, al-Sharq al-Awsat (21.2.1983), p. 15; A. Baha al-Din, ‘Idha Kanat Dimuqratiyya Haqqan’, alSharq al-Awsat (23.2.1983), p. 11. 19 M. al-Sadani, ‘Laysa ila’, al-Siyasa (17.2.1983), p. 13. 20 ‘A. Salama, ‘Dars Kabir min Dakhil Israil’, al-Wafd (3.7.1992), p. 7. 21 L. al-Mutii, ‘Muwajahat al-Haqiqa Bayna al-Ishaqayni’, Al-Wafd (28.6.1992), p. 7; Abd al-Rahman al-Lahabi, a Saudi columnist who considers himself an independent analyst, analysed the 2009 election results as a demonstration of the pluralism in Israeli politics. ‘A. A. al-Lahabi, ‘Israil’ (14.2.2009): www. ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=162741 (accessed June 2012). 22 ‘A. Salim, Rihla ila Israil (Cairo: Madbuli al-Saghir, 1996), pp. 39–42. 23 K. Jalabi, Sikulujiyyat al-Unf wa-Istiratijiyyat al-Hall al-Silmi (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr al-Muasir, 1998), pp. 138–9. 24 K. Jalabi, ‘al-Haja ila Ghandi fi Filastin’ (8.5.2002): www.aawsat.com (accessed June 2012); Ismail Dabj is a Jordanian imprisoned in Israel between 1970–1985 who, upon his release, began working in Syria as a translator from Hebrew to Arabic. In an article in al-Hayah in February 2002, he wrote against analyses of the presence of conscientious objectors in the IDF as a sign of Israeli disintegration. He argued that democracy is a source of strength for Israel, as it allows Israeli society to reconcile its contradictions: MEMRI, ‘A Syrian reader writes to al-Hayah: Arab media do not comprehend; Israeli “conscientious objectors” prove Israel’s strength – not its weakness’ (27.2.2002): www.memri.org/report/ en/0/0/0/0/0/0/619.htm (accessed June 2012). 25 A. al-Mahdi, al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili: Azmat al-Dimuqratiyya wal-Salam (Cairo: Al-Dar al-Arabiyya lil-Nashr, 1999), pp. 71–3. 26 M. N. Sanad, ‘Leh ana muayyid li-Israil’ (13.12.2010): www.maikelnabil. com/2010/12/blog-post_13.html (accessed June 2012). 27 On Sanad’s biography see his website: www.maikelnabil.com; on his Pacifist approach, see: M. N. Sanad, ‘Bayan: Lan akhduma fi al-Jaysh al-Misri waatahammalu al-nataij’ (20.10.2010): www.maikelnabil.com/2010/10/blogpost_4244.html (accessed June 2012); on his support for peace with Israel, see: M. N. Sanad, ‘Nam lil-salam min ajli Misr qabla an yakuna min ajli Israil’ (5.9.2011): http://injail.maikelnabil.com/2011/09/blog-post.html (accessed June 2012); Sanad was imprisoned as punishment for his article ‘al-Jaysh wal-shab umruhum ma kanu id wahida’ (7.3.2011): www.maikelnabil.com/2011/03/ blog-post_07.html (accessed June 2012). 28 M. N. Sanad, ‘Min maslahat Israil iqamat dawla Filastiniyya’ (3.10.2011):

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http://injail.maikelnabil.com/2011/10/blog-post_03.html (accessed June 2012); Sanad was also influenced by al-Mahdi’s belief that the democratization of Egypt is likely to lead to the evolution of a ‘democratic peace’ with Israel, a ‘warm peace’ between two free peoples rather than a ‘cold peace’ between governments only. MaikelNabil, ‘Message to Israel calling for solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution’ (4.2.2011): www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdZjRHjlsck (accessed June 2012); M. N. Sanad, ‘Khawatir abitha fi al-shuun al-Israiliyya walFilastiniyya’ (20.1.2012): www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=292146 (accessed June 2012). 29 Sanad, ‘Leh ana muayyid li-Israil’. 30 E. Said, ‘Khamsun Sana Min al-Salb’, al-Hayah (5.5.1998), p. 17. 31 An early articulation of this thesis can be found in a book by Sabri Jiryis, published by Constantin Zurayq’s Institute for Palestinian Studies: S. Jiryis, al-Huriyyat al-Dimuqratiyya fi Israil (Beirut: Markaz al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, 1971); for a later articulation see in a book by a Palestinian-Jordanian journalist, Dr F. Rashid: Zayf Dimuqratiyyat Israil (Beirut: al-Muassasa al-Arabiyya lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr, 2004). 32 Al-Mahdi, al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili, p. 10. 33 N. Wali, Journey into the Heart of the Enemy, trans. M. Sela (Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 2009, in Hebrew), pp. 23, 45–7, 51, 141, 160–1, 186. 34 Sanad, ‘Leh ana muayyid li-Israil’. 35 T. Nashif, ‘Limadha yubdiu al-Arab fi Israil?’ (25.6.2010): www.ahewar.org/ debat/print.art.asp?t=0&aid=220294&ac=1 (accessed June 2012). 36 Z. Rashid, ‘Israil wa-nahnu “bila tashabih”’ (12.7.2010): www.aafaq.org (accessed June 2012). 37 F. al-Qasim, ‘Outdoing Israel in brutality’ (29.4.2011): http://gulfnews.com/ opinion/thinkers/outdoing-israel-in-brutality-1.799514 (accessed June 2012). 38 D. al-Bizri, ‘Bada sittin aman ala al-Nakba … limadha taakhkhara al-Arab wa-taqaddama al-Iraniyyun?’ (29.6.2008): http://alhayat.com (accessed June 2012). 39 K. Istanbuli, ‘Taallam min adwika’ (2.4.2011): http://alhayat.com (accessed June 2012). 40 A. A. Manhal, ‘al-Rais al-Israili Mushih Kassab yursiluhu qadi Arabi ila al-sijn 9 sanawat li-idanatihi bil-taharrush al-jinsi wa-ightisab wa-tashwish al-adala – hadhihi dawlat al-qanun’ (23.3.2011): www.ahewar.org/debat/show. art.asp?aid=251934 (accessed June 2012). 41 M. Kayyali, ‘Lakin man huwa al-masul an ikhfaqat al-hurub wa-ghayrahu ladayna?!’ (26.5.2007): http://alhayat.com (accessed June 2012). 42 A. al-Sawi, ‘Maltuna … wa-maltuhum’ (9.3.2009): http://today.almasryalyoum. com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=202024 (accessed June 2012). 43 See, for example, the statements of Sayyid al-Qimni and Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd in this manner, in: W. Abu-Uksa, ‘Liberal renewal of the turath: Constructing the Egyptian past in Sayyid al-Qemany’s works’, in M. Hatina and C. Schumann (eds), Arab Liberal Thought After 1967 (forthcoming). 44 Al-Mahdi, al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili, pp. 8, 11.

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45 Sanad, ‘Leh ana muayyid li-Israil’. 46 A. A. al-Lahabi, ‘Inkisar al-Sahayina’ (19.1.2010): www.ahewar.org/debat/ show.art.asp?aid=200072 (accessed June 2012). 47 On al-Akhdar’s biography, see: S. al-Nabulsi, Muhami al-Shaytan: Dirasa fi Fikr al-Afif al-Akhdar (Beirut: al-Muassasa al-Arabiyya lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr, 2005). 48 A. al-Akhdar, ‘Sual al-Lahza: Hal al-Muarada al-Filastiniyya lil-Salam Mujdiya?’, al-Hayah (24.7.1999), p. 21. 49 M. S. al-Ashmawi, al-Sira al-Hadari bayna al-Arab wa-Israil (Cairo: Dar al-Maarif, 1997), pp. 83–6, 97–100. 50 Sanad, ‘Leh ana muayyid li-Israil’. 51 F. al-Qasim, ‘Shalituhum wa-Shulutuna’ (16.10.2011): www.al-sharq.com (accessed June 2012). 52 I. al-Ahmad, ‘Ya bakhtak ya Shalit’ (15.10.2011): www.alqabas.com.kw/ node/22234 (accessed June 2012). 53 C. Zurayq, Mana al-Nakba (Beirut: Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayin, 1948), pp. 81–2. 54 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 55 Ibid., pp. 35–6. 56 Ibid., pp. 45–52, 60–2. 57 W. al-Khalidi, ‘Dunya al-Asatir wa-Dunya al-Waqi’, al-Hayah, part 1 (15.5.1998), p. 8. 58 S. A. Ibrahim, Ilm al-Nakbat al-Arabiyya fi Idarat al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili (Cairo: Markaz Ibn Khaldun li-Tanmiya, 1998), pp. 5–15, 63–9. 59 A. al-Muslimani, Ma Bada Israil: Bidayat al-Tawra wa-Nihayat al-Sahyuniyya (Cairo: Mirit lil-Nashr wal-Malumat, 2003), p. 19. 60 A. al-Muslimani, ‘Fi madih nazariyyat al-muamara 4’ (1.9.2008): http://today. almasryalyoum.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ArticleID=131544 (accessed June 2012). 61 Al-Mahdi, al-Sira al-Arabi al-Israili, pp. 128–34. 62 Zurayq, Mana al-Nakba, pp. 50–2. 63 C. Zurayq, al-Amal al-Fikriyya al-Amma lil-Duktur Constantin Zurayq: al-Mujallad al-Rabi (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wahda al-Arabiyya wa-Muassasat Abd al-Hamid Shumman, 1994), p. 1691. 64 Ibid., pp. 1655–6. 65 C. Zurayq, ‘Rethinking the Nakba’, trans. Y. Drori, in Y. Harkabi (ed.), What the Arabs Learned from their Defeat (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1972, in Hebrew), pp. 185–7, 207–8. 66 S. A. Ibrahim, Misr wal-Watan al-Arabi (Amman: Muntada al-Fikr al-Arabi, 1990), pp. 214–17. Ali Swidan, a Syrian, Kuwaiti-based columnist, wrote in similar fashion about the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, who was killed on February 2003 on board the Columbia space shuttle. Ramon was an IDF combat pilot who participated in the successful bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. Swidan criticized the Arabs who rejoiced upon hearing about the fatal accident; instead of gloating, he wrote, Arabs should adopt modern sciences, first upon the face of the earth, then in space: ‘A. Swidan, ‘“Ashan” ma

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tanqati!’ (24.7.2009): www.alraimedia.com/alrai/Article.aspx?id=146307& date=24072009 (accessed June 2012). 67 On Muntasir’s biography and his list of books, see his website: www.khaledmontaser.com (accessed June 2012). 68 K. Muntasir, Fubya al-Ilm (Cairo: Dar Akhbar al-Yawm, 2008), pp. 9–15, 79–81. 69 K. Muntasir, ‘Israil tataqaddamu bil-fiziya wa-nahnu bil-fuqaha’ (26.3.2009): www.ahl-alquran.com/site/arabic/show_article.php?main_id=5053 (accessed June 2012). See also an article by the liberal Copt Egyptian, Majdi Khalil: M. Khalil, ‘al-Muslimun wal-Yahud: Man yatafakhar ala man?’ (27.10.2009): www.elaph.com/Web/ElaphWriter/2009/10/496535.htm (accessed June 2012). 70 K. Muntasir, ‘Hal bil-adab wa-alfiyyat Ibn Malik sa-yatafawwaq al-Arab ala Israil?!!’ (27.6.2008): www.elaph.com/Web/ElaphWriter/2008/6/343355.htm (accessed June 2012). 71 K. Muntasir, ‘Hum ikhtaru al-kimiya wa-ihna ikhtarna al-fustan al-bumbay’ (10.10.2011): www.almasryalyoum.com/node/503303 (accessed June 2012). 72 J. al-Khazin, ‘Uyun wa-Adhan’, al-Hayah (11.10.2009), p. 14. 73 M. Matar, ‘Sual al-mashi – Nubil lil-tanabil!!’ (11.10.2009): www.alhayat-j. com/details.php?opt=1&id=97006&cid=1656 (accessed June 2012). 74 Y. Abd al-Qadir, ‘Nida lil-Hukuma al-Misriyya bi-muhakamat muddai “al-iluhiyya”’ (March 2010): www.4shbab.net/vb/showthread.php?t=89549 (accessed June 2012). 75 A. Tahir, ‘Haqaiq wa-akadhib hawla Israil’ (8.8.2010): www.yahoodi1. com/2010/08/blog-post_919.html (accessed June 2012). 76 F. Ghadry, ‘Why I admire Israel’ (14.5.2007): http://spme.org/spme-research/ letters-from-our-readers/farid-ghadry-why-i-admire-israel/3079/ (accessed June 2012). 77 A. Salim, al-Tatarruf wa-Thaqafat al-Salam (Beirut: Madarek, 2011), pp. 137–40. 78 S. Bashir and H. Saghiya, ‘1948: Hal Min Imkaniyya lil-Taswiya al-Filastiniyya al-Israiliyya ala Said al-Tarikh?’, al-Hayah (15.5.1998), p. 18; H. Saghiya and S. Bashir, Tasaddu al-Mashriq al-Arabi: al-Salam al-Dami fi al-Iraq wa-Filastin (Beirut: Riyadh al-Ris lil-Kutub wal-Nashr, 2004), pp. 37–47; H. Saghiya, Difaan an al-Salam (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashr, 1997), pp. 18, 64. 79 Al-Muslimani, Ma Bada Israil: Bidayat al-Tawra wa-Nihayat al-Sahyuniyya, p. 140. 80 A. al-Muslimani, ‘al-Muarrikhun al-judud fi Misr’ (20.2.2007): http://Today. almasryalyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=48638 (accessed June 2012).

Conclusion

From the early twentieth century through to the Arab Spring, Arab Islamist and liberal thinkers alike have identified the Zionist movement and Israel as enemies, or at least as adversaries – but also as role models that provide examples that should be followed. There is no intrinsic contradiction in the duality of the approach toward the Zionist enterprise; it reflects an ambivalent treatment of the ‘Western other’ in Arab Islamism and liberalism alike. Islamists have perceived the Zionist enterprise as an injustice and a historical distortion, whose removal from the Middle East is mandatory according to the principles of the faith. They have consistently repudiated recognition of or peace with Israel and have demonstrated an explicit and uncompromising stance that calls for the eradication of Jewish sovereignty over any part of Palestine. Nevertheless, they have also developed a set of religio-juristic and theological justifications that condone temporary compromises with Israel, as long as their temporality is assured. Israel’s success in defeating Arab armies, as well as its relative failures in confrontations with Islamist movements, have effectively served Islamist propaganda against Arab regimes. However, Islamist leaders had to align their actions with their limitations of power. Liberal thinking crystallized into two major factions with regard to Israel; one believing that the Zionist enterprise should be accepted for pragmatic reasons and the other maintaining that it should be contested. Since the 1970s, the liberals have experienced a second split. The ‘peace camp’ has emphasized that Israel should withdraw from all the lands that it occupied in 1967, but has also called for the promotion and intensification of diplomacy to end the conflict. This faction has sided, at times fervently, with normalization between Israel and its neighbours, and regarded the democratization of the Arab world as dependent on peace with Israel. The opposing liberal faction, the ‘refusal camp’, has rejected the terms of the diplomatic negotiations between Israel and its neighbours and resolutely opposed normalization with Israel. This

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faction has perceived the democratization of Arab societies as the necessary precondition for posing as a worthy opponent in the conflict with the Zionist enterprise, whether it is decided diplomatically or on the field of battle. Islamist thought has, from its beginning, regarded certain aspects of Zionism and eventually of the State of Israel as examples that should be followed. This approach is related to Islamism’s complex treatment of the West, a civilization that it seeks to reject and adopt at the same time. Based on the modernist-apologetic tradition, Islamists view some aspects of the West, and of Israel as a representation of the West, as distorted manifestations of values and traditions that originated in Islam and therefore can be integrated into Muslim societies in a reserved fashion. Islamist writings on Zionism and Israel as role models were founded on the assumption that Israel defeated the Arabs because it implemented principles that Islamists wish to promote in Arab societies. Among these are religious devotion, activism, strong relations with the diaspora and democracy. In some Islamist writings, the lessons attained from the Israeli experiment have been transformed into claims related to inner-Islamist debates. Thus, for instance, the understanding of Zionism as a modern religious movement has been utilized by wasati Islamists to prove the indispensability of their modernistic approach to religion; Israeli women serving and working in the public sphere have justified a similar shift in Islamic societies. The lessons learned from Zionist successes have also been transposed onto arguments against their liberal opponents. Thus, for instance, Israel as a Jewish and democratic country is proof for some Islamists that the linkage between religion and politics is not anti-democratic; on the contrary, it is a prerequisite for the ­development of democracy in Arab societies. From its inception, Arab liberal thought also developed an approach that views certain aspects of Zionism, and later on of Israel, as examples to follow. The liberal approach perceives the West as a hegemonic force that must be ousted in order to establish meaningful independence in Arab societies; however, it anchors its vision for these societies in a direct adoption of values and institutions rooted in Western liberal canons. This duality has enabled an understanding of the Zionist enterprise as an example from which Arabs should learn. Liberals have found in Zionism characteristics that they wish to implement in their own societies: the establishment of a democratic and pluralistic society, a pragmatic political approach, gender equality, freedom from religious duress and the development of science and technology on a rational basis. The military triumphs of democratic Israel have encouraged liberals to attack undemocratic Arab regimes that use the conflict as a

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pretext to delay political reforms. At the radical end of the spectrum of ‘peace thinkers’, Israel’s liberal nature has been invoked as legitimizing, in itself, its existence. Other ‘peace camp’ liberals have interpreted the lessons to be learned from Israel as an opportunity to promote normalization with it, but they emphasize that the main contribution of this process will be to strengthen Arab societies. On the other hand, ‘refusal camp’ liberals have described following the Israeli example as a ­necessary step in preparing for the struggle against it. What can Israelis learn from the diversity of thought discussed in this book? The richness of information about Zionism and Israel in Arab societies is one point worth mentioning. Arab liberal thinkers have noted the comprehensive and systematic study by Israelis of the Arab world as one of the secrets of the success of Zionism, in contrast to the Arab refusal to study Israeli reality. However, reading Arab Islamist and liberal writing reveals a different picture of intellectuals well versed in the scientific achievements, political struggles, judicial procedures and social processes in Israel, even if they use and analyse them selectively in accordance with their worldviews. This proficiency is very much superior to the knowledge of most educated Israelis of Arab societies, which is derived mainly from media reports that focus on security issues or on folkloristic incidents. Those who believe that Israeli–Arab peace is still possible may feel uncomfortable with a straightforward reading of Islamist and liberal thought. This sort of reading uncovers the depth of Arab rejection of and opposition to the Zionist enterprise. The impression arises that instead of moving forward, the hands of the clock of the conflict are constantly regressing to the unresolved fundamental issues that evoked it in the first place. Common to Israeli thought on the conflict is the dichotomy between Arab Islamists who are the enemies of Zionism, and Arab liberals who are partners for peace. The real picture is different. Among Arab liberals, the camp that enjoys relatively greater popular clout is the ‘refusal camp’, which opposes peace and normalization (albeit not as firmly as the Islamist side). Nevertheless, the liberal ‘peace camp’, small and marginal as it is, represents lucid and consistent voices. It includes individuals born in the age of peace treaties between Israel and its neighbours, who acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, believe in the possibility to achieve fair and long-lasting agreements and act decisively in order to strengthen the relationship between the peoples. These voices, feeble as they are, just might be ‘the ray of sunlight that lifts the dark clouds’. That, of course, also depends on the actions of Israel itself. A crystallization of some of the examples and lessons obtained by Arab Islamists and liberals from studying the Zionist enterprise

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highlights several points of agreement. Despite their many deep ideological differences, Islamists and liberals alike have identified social cohesion, political realism and activism, long-term planning, scientific and technological development, gender equality and pluralistic democracy as important factors in Israel’s success. These are valuable lessons for the Arab world. They are just as valuable for Israelis when debating the future of their state.

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Index

Abbas, Mahmud (Abu-Mazin) 48, 54 Abd al-Hadi, Husni 105 Abd al-Nasser, Jamal 29, 31, 48, 73, 85, 112–13, 124, 160 Abduh, Muhammad 10, 68 Abu al-Nasr, Muhammad 34 Abu al-Sabah, Ata Allah 78 Abu Ghosh 162 Abu-Hatzera, Aharon 91 Abu-Marzuq, Musa 53 Abu-Nidal 116 Afghanistan 50, 57–8 Ahad Haam 106 Ajami, Fuad 16 Akif, Muhammad Mahdi 35 Al-‘Isa, ‘Isa 149 Al-‘Isa, Yusuf 149 Al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din 10, 68 Al-Ahmad, Iqbal 168 Al-Ahram (newspaper) 12, 32, 113, 151 Al-Ahram Center 121 Al-Akhdar, al-Afif 165–6 Al-Aqsa (mosque) 16, 27, 34–6, 46, 74-5, 128, 139 Al-Aryan, Isam 56 Al-Ashmawi, Muhammad Said 166 Al-Assad, Bashar 133–5, 162 Al-Assad, Hafiz 33, 126 Al-Aswani, Ala 138–9 Al-Attar, Abd al-Nasser Tawfiq 74 Al-Awa, Muhammad Salim 54 Al-Awda, Salman 94 Al-Azhar University 5, 32, 57, 156

Al-Banna, Hasan 4–7, 26–30, 40, 51, 68, 72, 81–3, 85, 89 Al-Barudi, Fakhri 109 Al-Bizri, Dalal 163 Al-Dar al-Arabiyya lil-Nashr (publishing house) 118 Al-Dimuqratiyya (journal) 12 Aleppo 133 Al-Falahat, Salim 95 Al-Farisi, Salman 90 Algeria 30, 43 Al-Ghad (political party) 13, 170 Al-Ghadri, Farid 133, 174 Al-Ghannushi, Rashid 7, 50, 78, 93–4 Al-Ghazali, Muhammad 7, 34, 68, 72, 74, 76, 87–92 Al-Hakim, Tawfiq 113, 115–16, 124–5 Al-Halal wal-Haram fi al-Islam (book) 73 Al-Hawari, Muhammad 50 Al-Hayah (newspaper)14, 129, 163–6, 174 Al-Hayah al-Jadida (newspaper) 174 Al-Haywan, Hasan 57 Al-Hilal (journal) 150 Al-Hiwar al-Mutamaddin (website) 165 Al-Hudaybi, Muhammad Mamun 35 Al-Husseini, Hajj Amin 26, 81, 106–7 Ali, Haydar Ibrahim 4 Al-Imam, Amid 110 Al-Islam al-Yawm (website) 94 Al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya in Lebanon 75 Al-Jibali, Hamadi 93-4 Al-Jihad: al-Farida al-Ghayiba (book) 59

208 Al-Jumhuriyya (newspaper) 110 Al-Karmil (newspaper) 105 Al-Khalidi, Walid 169 Al-Khalil, Samir 132 Al-Khazin, Jihad 174 Al-Lahabi, Abd al-Rahman 165 Al-Mahdi, Amin 118–21, 127–8, 159–61, 165, 170 Al-Malt, Jawdat 164–5 Al-Manar (newspaper) 6, 79–80 Al-Maqadma, Ibrahim 39, 49, 77–8, 83 Al-Mawlawi, Faysal 75 Al-Muqattam (newspaper) 151 Al-Muqtataf (newspaper) 79 Al-Muslimani, Ahmad 170, 176 Al-Nabulsi, Shakir 9–10 Al-Nadhir (journal) 81 Al-Nahar (newspaper) 23 Al-Nahda (movement and political party) 7–8, 50, 93–4 Al-Nahhas, Mustafa 106–7, 176 Al-Najah University 82 Al-Nar wal-Damar fi Filastin (book) 27 Al-Nashif, Thaer 162 Al-Nuqrashi, Mahmud Fahmi 29, 108 Al-Qabas (newspaper) 114 Al-Qadhafi, Muammar 3, 113 Al-Qaida (organization) 58 Al-Qaradawi, Yusuf 7, 30, 46, 49–51, 54, 68, 73–5, 82, 86, 88–9, 92 Al-Qasim, Faysal 163, 167 Al-Qaud, Hilmi Muhammad 45, 49, 75–6, 82 Al-Quwatli, Shukri 28, 109–10 Al-Rantisi, Abd al-Aziz 39 Al-Risala (weekly magazine) 14 Al-Sabil (newspaper) 14, 84 Al-Sad, Jawdat 50 Al-Sadani, Mahmud 157 Al-Safir (newspaper) 129 Al-Samman, Abdallah 85 Al-Sawi, Ahmad 164–5 Al-Sayyid, Ahmad Lutfi 10, 105, 151 Al-Shab (newspaper) 14 Al-Sharq al-Awsat (newspaper) 14 Al-Shqaqi, Fathi 36–8, 46, 79 Al-Sibai, Mustafa 28–9

Index Al-Siyasa (Egyptian newspaper) 106 Al-Siyasa (Kuwaiti newspaper) 14 Al-Talia al-Arabiyya (organization) 129 Al-Tilmisani, Umar 82 Al-Turabi, Hasan 7 Al-Ubaydi, Ibrahim Assal 84 Al-Uthaymin, Muhammad b. Salih 92 Al-Zahhar, Mahmud 42 Al-Zaim, Husni 110 Al-Zarqan, Ahmad 35 American University in Cairo 123 Amitay, Yossi 16 Amman 57 Amman University 57 Annan, Muhammad Abdallah 106 April 6 (movement) 160 Arabs’ Position in Their Conflict with Israel, The (book) 15 Arafat, Yasir 53, 126, 128–9 Argentina 170 Asyut University 75 Aumann, Yisrael 15 Awdat al-Way (book) 113 Ayalon, Ami 128 Azzam, Abdallah 49–50, 57–8, 74 Badi, Muhammad 56 Balfour, Arthur James 27, 80, 88, 104–6, 111, 151–2, 170 Barak, Ehud 126 Bar-Tal, Daniel 18 Basel 67, 75, 85 Bashir, Salih 131, 175–6 Baskin, Gershon 139 Bath (political party) 4, 73, 132, 162 Begin, Menachem 45, 76, 91 Beirut 12, 54, 118, 124, 150, 169 Ben-Elissar, Eliyahu 45 Ben-Gurion University 122 Ben-Gurion, David 73, 78, 122, 160–1, 166, 169 Berlin 148, 162 Bin-Ladin, Usama 58 B’nai B’rith (organization) 50 Buffet, Warren 174 Bush, George W. 11, 131–4

209

Index Cairo 28, 34, 38, 43, 45, 105–7, 114, 118, 120, 123, 127, 150, 162, 176 Cairo University 105, 176 Cambridge University 129 Cannes Film Festival 123 Carthage 114 Center for Arab Unity Studies 12, 156 Chalabi, Ahmad 131–3 Chechnya 89 Ciechanover, Aaron 15 Cyprus 119, 156 Czechoslovakia 132 Darwin, Charles 50 David (biblical figure) 76 Dayan, Moshe 45, 73, 75, 78 Dayan, Yael 45 De Gaulle, Charles 91 Deir Yasin 120 Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine 132, 165 Deri, Arieh 93 Dhunaybat, Abd al-Majid 35 Difaan an al-Salam (book) 130 Doha 124 Dream TV 172 Dreyfus, Alfred 80 Egypt 3–4, 7, 9–11, 14–16, 26–7, 29–35, 43–5, 48, 55–9, 67, 73, 77, 81, 93, 106–8, 110, 112–16, 118, 120, 122–6, 128, 137–40 Egypt under Sadat: The Search for a New Orientation (book) 15 Egyptian Jihad Organization 33 Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth (organization) 9, 13 Egyptian University 105, 151 Eilat, Eliyahu 109 Elaph (website) 172 England 8, 111, 129, 132 Eritrea 75, 163 Eshkol, Levi 75 Euphrates 49, 81, 93, 167 Europe 6, 11, 14, 48, 50, 79, 90, 111, 114, 131

European Council for Fatwa and Research 50, 86 Facebook 160, 174 Fahd (King of Saudi Arabia) 33 Falklands Islands 119 Faraj, Abd al-Salam 59 Faruq (King of Egypt) 29, 108 Fatah (movement) 33, 36, 48, 116, 174 Filastin (newspaper) 149 Filastin al-Muslima (journal) 14, 38, 50 Foucault, Michel 17 Foundation for Middle East Peace 128 France 108–9, 165 Freedom and Justice Party 56 Freemasonry 50, 80 Fuad I (King of Egypt) 105 Gaza 34, 36, 38–9, 41–3, 45, 53–4, 78 Germany 50, 114, 119, 164, 170 Ghad al-Thawra (political party) 136–7 Ghalyun, Burhan 135 Ghawsha, Ibrahim 41, 75 Ghunaym, Wajdi 34 Golan Heights 124–5, 134, 158, 162 Goldmann, Nahum 112 Goliath (biblical figure) 76 Google (company) 173 Great Britain 27, 80, 105–9, 124, 170 Greece 119 Hadarat al-Islam (journal) 14 Haifa 105, 162, 164 Hamas (movement) 8, 36–9, 41–2, 46, 48, 50, 53–4, 75, 77–8, 83, 85, 94–5, 167 Hamburg 162 Hamrush, Ahmad 112 Haniya, Ismail 39 Harkabi, Yehoshafat 15 Hassan, Hassan Muhammad 87 Hawatma, Nayif 132 Haykal, Muhammad Hussein 106 Hazorea (kibbutz) 128 Hebrew University 67, 104, 129, 151–2 Hershko, Avraham 15

210 Herzl, Benjamin Zeev 71, 75, 78–80, 83, 85, 148–50, 166 Hitler, Adolf 48 Hizb al-Umma (political party) 10 Hizbullah (organization) 127 Hourani, Albert 9–10 Hussein b. Talal (King of Jordan) 33 Hussein, Abd al-Khaliq 9 Hussein, Saddam 132–3, 162 Hussein, Taha 14, 107, 110, 176 Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies 123, 127 Ibrahim, Sad al-Din 123–8, 138, 156, 169, 172 Illinois 168 Imara, Muhammad 55, 77–8 Imarat Yaqubyan (book) 138 India 48, 173 Institute for Palestinian Studies 169 Iran 129, 174 Iraq 11, 14, 29, 89, 131–3, 162 Iraqi National Congress (organization) 132–3 Iscar (company) 174 Islamic Action Front (political party) 84 Islamic Jihad in Palestine (organization) 36–8, 53–4 Islamic Movement in Israel 163 Israel and democracy 89–95, 155–68 and hi-tech 173–5 and Jewish Diaspora 83–4, 86–9 and the New Historians 175–6 and pragmatism 168–71 and religion 72–9 and science 67–8, 171–5 Israeli Parliament (Knesset) 31, 133–4, 161–2, 164 Istanbuli, Khurshid 164 Italy 162 Jabr, Abd al-Aziz 34 Jadd al-Haqq, Ali Jadd al-Haqq 32 Jalabi, Khalis 158 Japan 119 Jeddah 57

Index Jenin 57 Jerusalem 15, 26, 29, 31, 34, 37, 54, 59, 67, 73–4, 76, 81, 85, 104–6, 115, 124, 126–9, 151, 163 Jesus 49, 74 Jewish Agency 108–9 Jewish National Fund 81 Jews’ State, The (book) 80, 83 Jordan 9, 16, 29, 31, 33–5, 43, 84, 95, 108 Jurassic Park (film) 50 Katsav, Moshe 163–4 Kayyali, Majid 164 Kemal, Mustafa (Atatürk) 50 Kennedy, John F. 90 Kfar Etzion 120 Khaybar 52 Kifaya (movement) 138 King Abd al-Aziz University 57 Kingscourt (fictional character) 148 Kishk, Muhammad Jalal 30, 77 Kosova 89 Kuwait 11, 67, 125 Labour Party (Israel) 15 Lampson, Miles 107 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 131 Lebanon 9, 41–3, 50, 75, 91, 116, 124, 129, 139, 164–5 Lenin, Vladimir 50 Liberal Constitutionalist Party 105 Libya 3, 113 Likud (political party) 73, 157–8, 167 Limassol 146 Lindenstrauss, Micha 164–5 Lisbon 116 Locke, John 8 London 7, 93, 107, 170 Mahfuz, Najib 113–16 Mahir, Ali 27 Mahmud, Muhammad 107 Makiyya, Kanan 131–3 Manhal, Ali Ajil 164 Manning, D. J. 8 Mardam, Jamil 108–10

211

Index Marx, Karl 50 Mashhur, Mustafa 34–5 Massachusetts 132 Matar, Muwaffaq 174 Mbeki, Thabo 94 Mecca 38, 52, 55, 76, 85 Medina 32, 38, 52, 76 Meir, Golda 15, 75, 92, 112 Microsoft 174 Misr al-Fatah (political party) 106 Morocco 9, 29 Moscow 48 Moses (biblical figure) 74 Mount Scopus 104 Mubarak, Husni 56, 122–4, 126, 135–8, 157, 160, 166 Mubarak, Jamal 137 Mubarak, Muhammad 67-8 Muhammad (the Prophet) 32, 48–9, 52, 55 Muntasir, Khalid 172–3 Mursi, Muhammad 136 Mushrafa, Mustafa 176 Muslim Brothers (movement) 4, 5, 7, 12, 25–30, 32–7, 41, 45, 49, 51–2, 55–7, 67–8, 77, 81–2, 84, 86, 95, 97, 106, 108, 136, 166, 173 Muslim World League 85, 87 Mustafa, Shukri 58 Nafsu, Azat 15 Napoleon Bonaparte 7 National Bloc (political party) 108–10 National Party (Syria) 110 Nazareth 162 Nazzal, Muhammad 53, 83 Netanyahu, Benjamin 43, 92, 118, 127 Network of Arab Liberals (organization) 9 New Middle East, The (book) 46 New York 87, 168 Nietzsche, Friedrich 50 Nile (river) 49, 167 Nur, Ayman 135–8, 170 Nusayba, Sari 128–9

Ofek 1 (satellite) 172 Ohio 168 Old-New Land (book) 148 Olmert, Ehud 94 Operation Entebbe 15 Other Opinion, The (book) 118, 121, 127, 159 Ottoman Empire 4, 50 ‘Our Programme’ (essay) 81 Oz, Amos 139 Packer, George 133 Palestinian Legislative Council 11 Paris 139, 176 Peace Now (movement) 128 People’s Party (Egypt) 108 Peres, Shimon 33, 46, 92 Perle, Richard 131-2 PLO 31, 33–4, 36, 38–9, 42, 53, 93, 116, 121, 128 Podeh, Eli 16 Princeton University 111 Qara, George 164 Qasim, Abd al-Sattar 83 Qatar 73, 124 Qutb, Muhammad 7, 50 Qutb, Sayyid 5, 33, 37, 48, 85 Rabin, Yitzhak 91, 93, 157 Ramallah 162 Rashid, Zaynab 162 Rehovot 150 Reschid (Rashid) Bey (fictional character) 148 Rida, Rashid 10, 68, 79–83, 86, 149 Riyadh 39 Rogers, William 112, 124 Rotary (organization) 50 Roy, Oliver 4 Russia 39, 50, 136, 173 Ruz al-Yusuf (newspaper) 112 Sabra and Shatila (refugee camp) 15, 124, 156, 159 Sadat, Anwar 15, 31–3, 49, 59, 112–16, 121, 124–7, 140, 157, 160, 166

212 Sadist Party 108 Saghiya, Khazim 129–31, 175–6 Sahih al-Bukhari (book) 74 Said, Edward 2, 161 Salah, Raid 163 Salama, Ali 157 Salim, Ali 158, 175, 121–2, 127–8 Sanad, Maikel Nabil 150–69, 162, 165, 167 Sartawi, Isam 116 Sasson, Eliyahu 108 Saudi Arabia 5, 7, 57–8, 67, 87, 90–1 Saudi Council of Senior Scholars 92 Schindler’s List (film) 50 Sela, Avraham 16 Shahdi, Muhammad 76 Shalah, Ramadan 54 Shalan, Muhammad 156 Shalit, Gilad 95, 167–8 Shamir, Shimon 15 Shamir, Yitzhak 157–8 Sharett, Moshe 108 Sharon, Ariel 54, 91, 157, 159 Shebaa Farms 127 Shechtman, Dan 67, 173 Shumayl, Shibli 151 Sidqi, Ismail 106, 108 Silat al-Harithiyya 57 Sinai Peninsula 42, 57, 127, 137, 167, 170 Socialist International Congress (organization) 113 Sorbonne (university) 135 South America 11 Soviet Union 31, 58, 90, 171 Spain 8, 111 Spielberg, Steven 50 Sudan 14 Syria 10, 13–14, 28–9, 33–4, 43, 108–10, 117, 126, 133–5, 155, 158, 164, 167 Tahir, Amira 174 Tahrir Square 2, 67, 138 Takfir wal-Hijra (organization) 58 Talat Harb 176

Index Technion 173 Tel Aviv 30, 106, 133, 148, 150, 174 Temple Mount 129 Tunisia 7, 9, 14, 93–4 Turkey 124 Uganda 170 Uktubir (weekly magazine) 115 Umar b. al-Khattab 90–1 Umm Kulthum 74, 176 United Nations 28, 108, 111 United States 9, 29, 31, 39, 67, 87, 111, 115–17, 122, 125, 132, 136, 139, 168, 170 University of Chicago 131 Ussishkin, Menachem 81 Wafd (political party) 105–8, 136, 157–8, 176 Wali, Najm 161–2 Wall Street Journal (newspaper) 137 Washington 94, 111, 123, 128, 168, 170 Washington University 123 Webman, Esther 47 Weizmann Institute 173 Weizmann, Chaim 87–8, 107, 109, 173 West Bank 36, 43, 45, 53, 73, 122 Wolfowitz, Paul 132 World Assembly of Muslim Youth (organization) 85 World Jewish Congress 112 Yad Vashem (museum) 85–6 Yadlin, Rivka 15–16 Yahoo 173 Yasin, Ahmad 36–7, 39, 53–4 Yedioth Aharonoth 33 Yonath, Ada 15, 23, 174 Zaghlul, Sad 176 Zaydan, Jurji 150 Zevi, Sabbatai 50 Zionist Congress 75, 79–80, 83, 85 Zurayq, Constantine 111–12, 128, 135, 168–9, 171 Zuwayl, Ahmad 174